Fine in a car, awkward in anything else. About six in ten drive to work. Nearly a quarter work from home and sidestep the question entirely. Buses run, though half the stops fall silent at the weekend, and the train share rounds to nothing. Connectivity here is a fibre line and a set of car keys, in that order.
There is no railway station. The train share of commuting is 0.1%, which is a polite way of saying nobody. The village did have a line once, running from 1901 to 1917, though it never connected to the rest of the national network and reached the outside world via a pedestrian ferry from Appledore to Instow. Part of its trackbed is now stretch of the South West Coast Path, which is the most honest fate a railway to nowhere could hope for. Buses cover the gap, from 22 stops, carrying about 4% of commuters.
The commute mix tells the real story. About 60% drive, roughly 23% work from home, about 7% walk and around 1% cycle. Roughly 18% of households have no car at all, while about 37% run two or more, and those two figures describe two entirely different experiences of the same village.
The Department for Transport's modelled journey times, which describe the area rather than any particular front door, put the nearest town centre 11 minutes away by car, 20 by public transport, 19 by bicycle and 47 on foot. That walking figure is the finding rather than a footnote: this is not somewhere you stroll into town for a forgotten pint of milk.
Broadband is the part that works. Gigabit-capable service reaches about 89% of premises, superfast covers all of them, and nothing sits below the universal service obligation. Mobile coverage follows suit, with essentially every address reached by at least one operator and about 95% by all of them.
For everyday destinations, the same Department for Transport statistics put a doctor's surgery 8 minutes away by car, 14 by public transport and 17 on foot. A food store is 7 minutes by car or 11 walking. Employment centres are 16 minutes by car and 25 by public transport. A hospital is the outlier at 29 minutes by car against 74 by public transport, which is the difference between an inconvenience and an afternoon. All of these date from 2019, and while the distance to a fixed building does not change, bus networks have been trimmed since, so the public transport figures deserve more suspicion than the car and walk ones.
Current bus data gives the sharper picture. Across the stops with service information, the average is about 37 scheduled weekday departures each and roughly two departures in the peak hour. About 52% of stops, 11 of the 21 measured, have any weekend service at all. A stop on a pole is not a bus service, and the gap between those two things is where people quietly buy a second car.
Noise, at least, is not the trade-off. No postcode here sits near or above sixty-five decibels of road noise, the level at which official mapping starts treating traffic as a significant environmental factor, and none reach it for railway noise either. That is what happens when the busy road is somewhere else and the railway closed during the First World War.
Electric vehicle drivers should plan ahead. The area has one public charge point with one connector, and none of it is rapid. Charging here is something you organise around, not something you do while buying milk.
Middling overall, and lopsided with it. The digital connection is genuinely strong, strong enough to make working from here practical, while the public transport is thin enough that the car does every job the buses cannot.