Old Sarum is connected by car and by broadband, and not by much else. The nearest station is over in Salisbury, and close to nobody here commutes by train. Half the households run two vehicles or more. A third of working residents never leave the house on a weekday morning at all. For a place with a Roman hillfort attached, the modern infrastructure is a driveway and a fibre line.
Salisbury Rail Station is the rail option, and about 1% of working residents use a train to get to work. Buses have 18 stops within the area and carry about 4% of commuters. Neither figure describes a place organised around public transport, and neither was ever likely to.
What people actually do is straightforward: about 52% drive, about 33% work from home, about 4% walk and about 2% cycle. Around 51% of households keep two cars or more, and about 10% keep none. Two cars is not extravagance here, it is a design assumption.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times, which describe the area rather than any particular front door, put the nearest town centre 20 minutes away by car, 29 by public transport, 39 by bicycle and 111 minutes on foot. That last number is the finding rather than a curiosity. Nobody walks it twice.
Broadband is where the place quietly excels. Gigabit reaches about 96% of premises and superfast about 99%, and nothing falls below the universal service minimum.
Mobile is similar. Coverage from at least one operator reaches every postcode, and all operators between them reach about 98%.
Electric charging is the opposite story. There is one public charge point in the area carrying two connectors, and none of it is rapid. Charging here is something you schedule overnight rather than something you do while shopping.
The practical shape of a commute follows from all that. The third who work from home have opted out of the problem entirely. Everybody else is driving, and the timetable has very little say in the matter.
On the same modelled figures, a doctor's surgery is 14 minutes by car, 25 by public transport and 65 on foot. A hospital is 26 minutes by car and 53 by public transport. A food store is 10 minutes by car and 41 on foot. Employment centres come out at 20 minutes by public transport against 40 by car, which is either a win for the bus network or a comment on where the traffic sits. All of these date from 2019. The distances have not moved, but the public transport times have aged as services were withdrawn, so they deserve more suspicion than the driving and walking ones.
The buses themselves are better than the commuting split suggests. Of the 18 stops, 15 carry service data, and those average 64 scheduled departures across a weekday, with an average of 4.5 buses in the peak hour. About 93% of stops have some weekend service. Those are counts of departures rather than routes, and unlike the journey-time modelling they describe the timetable as it currently stands.
Road noise is the running cost of all this driving. Every postcode in the area sits near or above 65 decibels, the threshold at which official noise mapping treats road noise as significant, and the loudest band present reaches 75. Rail noise does not register anywhere here, which is consistent with how little use the railway gets.
Connectivity is the softest part of the case for Old Sarum: comfortable if you drive, workable if your job is upstairs, and a real constraint if your day begins on a platform. The broadband is excellent, which is the modern consolation prize, and for a third of the working population here it turns out to be enough.