Combe Martin is poorly connected, and the village has quietly reorganised itself around that fact. There is no railway. About a quarter of people work from home. Nearly half of households keep two cars or more. The broadband arrives at superfast and stops there. Everything works fine, provided nothing you need is time-critical.
Rail does not feature. The census records a train commute share that rounds to zero, which is what happens when there is no railway to commute on. Buses do exist, with 27 stops across the village, but only about 1% of residents use one to get to work.
The census tells the real story of how this place moves. Around 57% drive to work and about 24% work from home, and those two shares between them cover most of the working population. Roughly 10% walk, about 1% cycle. Around 13% of households have no car at all, and about 44% have two or more. In a village on one valley road, the second car is not a luxury purchase, it is the thing that gets the other adult to work.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times put the nearest town centre at about 20 minutes by car and roughly 29 minutes by public transport. Cycling takes around 38 minutes. Walking takes about 99 minutes, which is not a commute so much as a day out with a purpose. Those figures are modelled for the area rather than measured from any particular front door, and the public transport ones date from 2019, so they describe a bus network as it was rather than as it is.
The same statistics cover the errands that structure a week. A general practice is about 18 minutes by car, roughly 32 by public transport and around 103 minutes on foot, which is the honest way of saying you drive to the doctor. A hospital is about 30 minutes by car and roughly 63 by public transport. A food store is the outlier in the good direction, at about 8 minutes by car and around 20 on foot. Employment centres sit at about 35 minutes by car and roughly 33 by public transport, one of the few journeys where the bus is not the slower option.
On the buses themselves, and these figures are current rather than modelled, 26 stops carry service data showing an average of 19 scheduled departures per stop on a weekday. At peak hour that averages about 1 bus per stop. Around 92% of stops have some weekend service, which is better than most rural networks manage. One bus an hour at your stop is a bus. It is not a service you can build a job around.
Broadband is uniform and capped. Ofcom's mapping shows superfast available at every premise in the village and gigabit available at none of them. There is nothing below the universal service obligation either, so nobody here is stranded, and nobody here is on full fibre. The whole village sits on the same tier, which at least removes the argument about which end of the road got lucky.
Mobile is the quiet success. At least one operator covers roughly 100% of premises, and all four cover about 96%, so switching networks to fix a signal problem is not the local ritual it is in a lot of Devon valleys.
Road noise is a non-issue on the official measure. No postcode here sits near the 65-decibel threshold at which national mapping treats road noise as significant, and the same is true for railway noise, there being no railway to make any.
Electric vehicles need planning. The area has 1 public charge point with 2 connectors, one of them rapid. A single rapid unit for the whole village means charging is an appointment you keep rather than something you do while buying milk, and anyone going electric here will want a driveway and a home charger before they want anything else.
Connectivity is the weakest thing about Combe Martin by a distance. No rail, one bus an hour at the busiest time of day, gigabit nowhere, and a car doing the work for everything the valley cannot supply itself.