Badly by public transport, and perfectly well by car and by cable. Seven in ten drive to work. Almost nobody takes the train, even with a station in the village. Almost nobody takes the bus either. Roche is connected the way most of inland Cornwall is connected, through a windscreen and a broadband line.
The rail infrastructure is the odd part. Roche Rail Station sits in the village and Bugle Rail Station serves the next one along, and the share of working residents commuting by train is 0.2%. Thirteen bus stops are scattered across the area, and the bus commute share is 0.7%. Track and stops are not the problem. What runs along them is.
The commute mix tells the real story. About 71% of working residents drive, about 16% work from home and about 5% walk. Around 48% of households run two or more cars, and about 15% have none at all, which in a village with these bus numbers is less a lifestyle choice than a logistical position to be admired from a distance.
The Department for Transport's journey-time statistics put the nearest town centre at about a 20 minute drive, or about 34 minutes on public transport. That gap is the whole argument in two numbers.
Broadband is where the village is genuinely well served. About 94% of premises can get superfast, and about 42% can reach gigabit speeds, which is the same figure as ultrafast because the same lines deliver both. For a place this size, the digital connection is in considerably better order than the physical one.
Mobile coverage is close to complete, reaching about 100% of the area from at least one operator and about 95% from all of them.
For a typical working week, that means the car does everything and the timetable does very little. The 16% working from home are the ones getting the best of the arrangement, because they bought a rural address and use the part of the infrastructure that actually performs. Anyone else is planning their day around a vehicle.
The same modelled journey-time statistics put the town centre at about 40 minutes by bicycle and about 116 minutes on foot, which is close to two hours and is the finding rather than a footnote. These are modelled figures for the area as a whole rather than a route measured from any particular front door, and they date from 2019, so the public transport numbers deserve more caution than the car and walking ones, given services have been cut across rural areas since.
For everyday destinations, the same statistics put a doctor's surgery about 9 minutes away by car, about 13 minutes by public transport and about 20 minutes on foot, and a food store about 7 minutes by car or about 12 minutes walking. Employment centres come in at about 23 minutes by car and about 34 minutes by public transport. The hospital is the outlier: about 39 minutes by car, and about 88 minutes by public transport, which is a figure to sit with properly if anyone in the household has regular appointments and no licence.
Current bus data, unlike the modelled times, is not aged. The stops with published timetables average about 11 scheduled departures on a weekday, with about one bus per stop in the peak hour, and every one of those stops has some weekend service. Eleven departures across a whole day is a usable service for the patient and a non-starter for anyone with a fixed shift.
On noise, official road-noise mapping flags about 6% of postcodes at or near the 65 decibel threshold, which is the level at which road noise is treated as significant, and 65 decibels is the loudest band recorded here. Rail noise mapping flags none of the area, which is a quiet irony for a village with a station.
Connectivity is the weakest thing about Roche by a distance, and the ranking would be worse still without the fibre. Buy here with a car, or buy here with a job that lives on the internet.