Connected by car, and by almost nothing else. The village is five miles of B road west of Penzance, which is where the trains stop and where everything else in this part of Cornwall happens. The broadband is genuinely excellent. The bus exists in a technical sense. Anyone who arrives here expecting to manage without a car is going to have an educational first fortnight.
Rail does not serve the village at all, and the commuting figures reflect it: the share of working residents travelling by train rounds to zero. Buses do run, with four stops in the village area, but they carry about 1% of commuters. Neither number is a complaint about the service. They describe a place where public transport is a fallback rather than a routine.
What actually happens is cars and kitchen tables. Around 58% of working residents drive to work and roughly 29% work from home, which between them account for the overwhelming majority of the parish's working week. About 5% walk and roughly 1% cycle. Around 10% of households have no car at all, while about 48% have two or more, which is the real tell: this is a place where the second vehicle is not a luxury but the arrangement that makes two adults employable.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey-time statistics, which describe the area rather than any particular front door, put the nearest town centre at about 22 minutes by car and roughly 45 minutes by public transport. By bicycle it is about 42 minutes, and on foot about 104 minutes. A walk of nearly two hours to the nearest town centre is not a figure to skim past. It is the single clearest statement of where this village sits in relation to everything else.
Broadband is the part that has quietly transformed living here. Gigabit-capable service reaches about 99% of premises, with ultrafast and superfast at the same level, and no premises fall below the universal service obligation. A granite cottage with no mains gas and a two-hour walk to town now has a better connection than plenty of city flats. Mobile coverage from at least one operator reaches about 100% of the area, and all operators cover about 95%, so the network you happen to be on matters a little but not much.
The rest of the everyday map comes from the same modelled statistics. A doctor's surgery is about 18 minutes by car and roughly 94 minutes on foot. A hospital is about 22 minutes by car and roughly 46 by public transport. A food store is about 9 minutes by car and roughly 29 minutes walking, which is the one errand that remains possible without a vehicle. Employment centres sit about 59 minutes away by car and roughly 57 by public transport. One caution on all of those: the public transport figures date from 2019 and rural services have not grown since, so treat them as optimistic, while the car and walking times are as good now as they were then.
On the bus service itself, the current data gives about 20 scheduled weekday departures per stop and roughly half a bus in the peak hour, with all four stops seeing some weekend service. Departures, not routes. Half a bus at peak means the timetable decides your working day rather than the other way round.
Road noise is a non-issue. No postcodes in the area sit near or above the 65-decibel threshold at which official mapping treats road noise as significant, and none are affected by rail noise either. The loudest thing outside is agricultural.
Connectivity is the middling part of St Buryan: the broadband and mobile coverage are as good as anywhere in the country, and everything that involves physically moving your body depends on owning a car and accepting that the nearest of most things is twenty minutes away.