Poorly, unless the connection you care about is a driveway. Rail barely registers here. The bus stops exist, and so does a timetable, and the two have an arrangement. Well over half the village drives to work, and nearly half the households run more than one car. Braunton is not cut off. It is car-shaped, which is a different thing and a more expensive one.
Trains are close to irrelevant to daily life. Under 1% of commuters travel by train, which is the sort of share you get when the nearest useful platform is somebody else's problem. Buses do more: there are 20 stops across the area, though only about 2% of commuters actually use one to get to work.
What the village actually does is drive. Around 54% of working residents commute by car. About 23% work from home, which for a place this far from a city is doing a lot of quiet economic lifting. Roughly 12% walk, and about 4% cycle. Around 15% of households have no car at all, while about 44% run two or more. That last pair is the real story: a minority manage without, and the majority have decided the answer to rural transport is simply owning more of it.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre at about 19 minutes by car against about 28 by public transport, which is closer than most rural gaps and still not a fair fight once you factor in waiting for the bus that produced that number.
The same modelling stretches the picture out across the other modes. Cycling to the town centre comes in at about 38 minutes, which is a genuine option for anyone who owns lycra and a grudge against parking charges. Walking it takes about 105 minutes, and that figure is the finding rather than a footnote: this is not a place where the next town is a stroll. These are modelled figures for the area as a whole, not a route measured from any particular front door.
Everyday errands are much kinder. The same statistics put a doctor's surgery at about 8 minutes by car, 13 by public transport or 19 on foot. A food store is about 9 minutes driving or 22 walking. Employment sits at roughly 12 minutes by car and 20 by public transport. A hospital is the outlier at about 20 minutes driving against about 44 by public transport. One caution on all of those: the public transport times were modelled in 2019 and services have been withdrawn across rural England since, so trust the car and walking numbers considerably more than the bus ones.
The bus figures worth having are the current ones. The stops here average 41 scheduled departures on a weekday, working out at roughly two buses an hour at peak, and every stop carrying service data runs at weekends too. That is a genuine service rather than a school run with delusions, and it is the single strongest part of the public transport case.
Broadband compensates for a lot. About 97% of premises can get superfast, about 28% can reach gigabit speeds, and none fall below the universal service minimum. Mobile coverage is close to complete, with roughly 100% of premises reached by at least one operator and about 96% by all of them. Working from home here is a broadband decision, not a bandwidth gamble.
Road noise is a non-issue. No postcodes in Braunton sit near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping starts treating road noise as significant, and none do for railway noise either.
Electric vehicles are the weak link in a village built around driving. There are 2 public charge points in the area, offering 4 connectors between them, and only 1 rapid unit. Charging here is something to schedule rather than something to do while picking up a loaf.
Connectivity is the thinnest part of Braunton's case, and no amount of good broadband disguises it. The village works beautifully for people who drive or work at home, and it asks a real sacrifice from anyone who does neither.