Great Torrington is superbly connected to the countryside and badly connected to everywhere else. There is no railway station. The old line is now a walking and cycling route, which is a lovely thing that gets nobody to an office. Most people drive, and most people always have. Connectivity here means a car, a full tank and a realistic view of Devon's lanes.
Rail is not an option from the town itself. Under 1% of residents commute by train, which is what happens when the nearest platform is a drive away rather than a walk. Nobody commutes by train because nobody can. Buses do exist and there are 22 stops in the town, though only about 3% of residents use one to get to work.
The commute mix explains the place better than any transport list. Around 58% of residents drive to work. About 17% walk, which is high, and reflects a compact town where the shops, the schools and a good deal of the employment sit inside the same square mile. Roughly 16% work from home. Cycling accounts for about 1%. On car ownership, around 15% of households have no car at all, while about 38% run two or more, which is the real signature of a rural town: the household with two earners needs two vehicles, because one bus will not cover both journeys.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre at about 9 minutes by car, 14 by bike, 22 by public transport and 28 on foot. These are modelled for the area rather than measured from any particular front door, so treat them as the shape of local travel rather than a timetable. The walk time is worth pausing on: a 28-minute walk to a town centre is a real option in good weather and a poor one in a Devon February.
The same statistics cover everyday destinations. A doctor's surgery comes out at about 9 minutes by car, 22 by public transport and 27 on foot. A food store is around 8 minutes by car and 22 on foot. Employment centres sit at about 8 minutes by car and 34 by public transport. A hospital is the outlier at roughly 41 minutes by car and nearly 78 by public transport, which is the number that should shape the decision for anyone with a chronic condition or an ageing parent. One caveat matters here: these journey times date from 2019, and while distances to fixed destinations barely move, rural bus services have been cut in plenty of places since, so the public transport figures deserve more scepticism than the car and walking ones.
Current bus data tells a better story than the commuting share suggests. The town's stops average about 28 scheduled weekday departures each, and around 86% of them see some weekend service, so this is a genuine network rather than a token one. The catch is at peak, where stops average under one bus an hour. A network that runs steadily through the day but thins out exactly when people need to reach work is a network built for shopping trips and hospital appointments, not commuting.
Broadband is the one connection that works properly. Superfast reaches about 99% of premises and gigabit around 30%, with ultrafast at about 3%. No premises fall below the minimum decent broadband standard. For a town where roughly 16% already work from home, that is the infrastructure that actually matters.
Mobile coverage holds up too. Around 100% of the area gets fourth or fifth generation service from at least one operator, and about 95% from all of them, so the network on the phone is unlikely to be the reason a call drops.
Road noise is a non-issue. No postcodes in the town sit near or above 65 decibels, the level at which official noise mapping treats road traffic as significant, and the same is true for railway noise.
Electric vehicles are the weak link in a town that runs on cars. There is one public charging location in the area, with three connectors, one of which is rapid. That makes charging something to plan around rather than something done during a supermarket shop.
Judged on getting out of it, Great Torrington is poorly connected, and the gap is not close: no station, buses that thin out at exactly the wrong hour, and a hospital run that takes most of an hour by car. The broadband is the compensation, and for a certain kind of household it is enough.