Connected by car, and by very little else. Rail is not a realistic option from here. The bus network exists on a map more convincingly than it does on a Sunday. Almost nobody commutes by public transport, and almost everybody either drives or stays put. The broadband, oddly, is the part that turned up on time.
There is no station in the area. The line closed in 1962 and the nearest running station is Crewkerne, which explains why rail carries roughly one commuter in a thousand. Buses do slightly better on paper, with 134 stops scattered across the town and the villages, though they account for only around three commuters in a thousand.
What people actually do is drive. About 56% of working residents commute by car, and roughly 31% do not commute at all because they work from home. Around 7% walk and about 1% cycle. Car ownership tells the same story from the other end: roughly 50% of households run two or more vehicles, while about 10% have none, which in a place laid out like this is a genuinely difficult way to live.
Department for Transport modelling puts the nearest town centre at about 12 minutes by car, or about 26 minutes by public transport. Doubling the journey to save the parking is a trade most people here decline.
Broadband is where the area quietly outperforms its road network. Gigabit-capable connections reach about 79% of premises and superfast reaches about 92%, which is why nearly a third of the working population can treat the commute as optional.
Mobile coverage is close to universal from at least one operator, and about 97% of the area gets a signal from all of them.
The same modelling puts the town centre at about 19 minutes by bicycle and about 45 minutes on foot. These are national statistics modelled for the area rather than a route measured from anybody's front door, and a three-quarter-hour walk to a town centre is not a walk anyone does twice.
For everyday destinations, the same source puts a doctor's surgery at about 10 minutes by car, 23 by public transport and 33 on foot, and a food store at about 9 minutes by car or 27 on foot. A hospital is about 30 minutes by car and about 75 by public transport. Reaching an employment centre models at about 25 minutes by public transport and about 51 minutes by car, which reflects where the jobs are rather than how fast the roads run. Those journey times date from 2019: the distances have not moved, but the public transport figures should be read with more suspicion than the driving ones, because rural services get withdrawn rather than added.
The current bus figures are the sharper test. Across the 102 stops carrying service data, the average stop sees about 13 scheduled departures on a weekday, and around 31% of stops have any weekend service at all. Averaged across those stops, the number of departures in the peak hour is zero. A stop with a pole and a timetable case is not the same thing as a bus service, and the arithmetic here is not subtle about which one this is.
Noise is the price of sitting beside a trunk-road junction. On official mapping, close to every postcode in the area sits near or above 65 decibels from road traffic, the level at which noise is treated as significant, with the loudest band present reaching 75 decibels. No postcodes register at that threshold for railway noise, which is one advantage of having lost the line.
For electric vehicles, the area has 6 public charge points offering 17 connectors between them, of which 3 are rapid. That makes charging something to plan around rather than something done incidentally while shopping.
Connectivity here lands squarely in the middle: excellent if the definition includes fibre and a driveway, poor if it involves a timetable. The strength is the broadband and the road access. The weak spot is everything that requires somebody else to be driving.