Connected by road, by broadband, and by almost nothing else. Nobody here commutes by train. Barely anyone catches a bus. Around six in ten drive to work and about half of households run two cars or more. The internet arrived in this village long before a decent timetable did, and the internet is winning.
There is no station in the village. The nearest is St Austell Rail Station, and the share of residents commuting by train in the last census was zero. Ten bus stops sit within the village bounding box, and 0.4% of residents travel to work by bus, which is a rounding error attached to a bus shelter.
What the village actually does instead is drive and stay indoors. Nearly 63% drive to work, 27% work from home, 5% walk and 1% cycles. Only about 9% of households have no car at all, while 50% have two or more, which is the clearest statement of intent in the whole brief. This is a place organised around the driveway.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre at about 11 minutes by car and 27 minutes by public transport. Those are modelled figures for the area rather than a route from any particular front door, and the public transport numbers date from 2019, so treat them as the optimistic version.
Broadband is the genuine strength and the reason the working-from-home share is what it is. Gigabit-capable service reaches 90% of premises, ultrafast the same 90%, and superfast reaches every premises in the village. No premises sit below the universal service obligation, the legal minimum standard for a broadband connection. Mobile coverage from at least one operator is effectively universal, and 95% of the area gets coverage from all operators, which is unusually complete for rural Cornwall.
Set out in full, the same modelled statistics give the nearest town centre as roughly 11 minutes by car, 20 minutes by bicycle, 27 minutes by public transport and 51 minutes on foot. That walk time is the finding rather than a footnote: the town is not walkable from here in any practical sense, and the bicycle beats the bus by a clear margin.
The everyday destinations follow the same pattern. A general practitioner surgery is about 14 minutes by car, 25 by bicycle, 29 by public transport and 64 minutes on foot. The nearest hospital is about 41 minutes by car and 73 by public transport, with the walk time capped at the modelling ceiling of two hours. A food store is the exception and the saving grace: about 7 minutes by car or public transport, 9 by bicycle and 13 minutes on foot. Employment centres run about 21 minutes by car and 35 by public transport, with walking again hitting the two-hour ceiling. Distance to a fixed destination is stable over time, but the public transport figures are the 2019 vintage and services have been withdrawn since, so the car and walk times are the ones to trust.
On the buses themselves, the current picture matters more than the stop count. The ten stops average eight scheduled departures each across a weekday, with an average of zero buses at peak hour, and all ten carry some weekend service. Eight departures spread across a day, none of them in the peak, is not a commuting option. It is a way of getting to St Austell mid-morning and back mid-afternoon if the timing suits you.
Road noise is worth knowing before you view. Official noise mapping treats 65 decibels as the threshold at which road noise becomes significant, and 96% of the village's postcodes sit near or above it, with the loudest band present reaching 70 decibels. Rail noise does not register here at all. What that means for any individual house depends entirely on which way it faces and what stands between it and the road.
Connectivity is the weak spot in Polgooth and the honest word for it is middling: the broadband and mobile coverage are genuinely good, and everything involving a timetable is not. Buy here on the assumption that the car is the transport plan and the fibre is the commute.