Gloucester to Taunton

 4th May 2023

Gloucester to Bath

There is a very fast and direct road, the A417, between Gloucester and Cirencester, but after the first few miles Stagecoach service 882 resolutely ignores it in favour of a picturesque meander through a maze of often single-track country lanes. The few passengers who travel to and from the villages no doubt value the service, but it has to be said that there weren't many of them.

My 09:50 departure could and should have left on time, but by the time the driver had ambled out of the canteen still clutching his morning coffee and spent ages rearranging the driving position and stowing his bag in the cab we were almost ten minutes behind schedule. Although the route was not exactly the easiest for fast bus operation (see above) we did seem to have made up some of the time by the time we reached Cirencester.

Since I was last in the town, buses have been banished from the town centre, which has been largely pedestrianised (although some space has been found for cars). They now arrive at and leave from on-street stands at the edge of the shopping area and those stops would be hard to find if you hadn't already arrived by bus.

St John the Baptist Parish Church in the centre of Cirencester

With most of an hour before my next bus I had time for an amble around the town centre and a cup of coffee from the old Citroen van outside the church (see pic above). When someone asked if they could share the rather large outdoor table I was sat at I said "yes" without a thought, only to discover that I was then sharing it with a group of canvassers from the Tory party! (It was local election day - in what you'd think would be a strong Tory area (Cotswold District Council) they lost 5 seats and the Lib Dems retained control of the council).

Indirect Route

Cirencester isn't exactly on the direct route from Gloucester to Bath; that would be via Bristol, but to follow that path would take me along a very similar route to my previous odyssey "Around the Edge of England" when I came this way in 2015. I'd therefore opted for a more inland route and one which would take in Bath, rather than Bristol and allow me to see a different part of Somerset on the way.

But before I could get to Somerset, I had to pass through a small corner of Wiltshire, which I did on my next bus: "Coachstyle's" service 93 to Malmesbury. Far from being a stylish coach, it was actually a rather battered Optare Solo bus with an extremely garrulous driver who attempted to carry out a conversation with whichever passenger he could persuade to listen throughout the journey!

Coachstyle service 93 to Malmesbury and some of its passengers.

Not long after leaving Cirencester, near the village of South Cerney, we crossed the border into Wiltshire for a brief transit of part of that county (the main visit will come later). This route was also very much along narrow country lanes and at one point we had to come to a shuddering stop to avoid a head on collision with a van that was being driven too fast, as to be fair, was our bus!

At Malmesbury I had a choice of routes - west to Yate or south to Chippenham, both of which would take me to my chosen overnight stopping place of Bath.  Before I could catch either bus I had an hour or so to spare. Lunch on these trips is often a snatched sandwich eaten on the bus, but today I had more time and on my walk around the town I came across Malmesbury Abbey and noticed it had a cafe, which would do very nicely.

Lunch stop at Malmesbury Abbey

I opted for the route via Chippenham, but whether I would have done so had I known that the Coachstyle service 99 I caught was being driven by the same talkative driver that had brought me from Cirencester is another matter. A fellow passenger, obviously a regular, recognised him and groaned!

At least this bus followed the main roads  for much of the way and we were soon in Chippenham, where I alighted in the town centre, before the bus reached the bus station at the far end of the town. 

I was at this stage still in Wiltshire, but my next bus would take me over the border ond on to Bath. Much of the journey was along the A4 and at Box we crossed the Great Western Railway main line just west of the famous tunnel and shortly afterwards entered Somerset.

SOMERSET: County Town: Taunton

The boundaries of Somerset have remained relatively unchanged since mediaeval times, the only significant changes being in the north. The traditional boundary with Gloucestershire was the River Avon. In 1373 Edward III declared that the city of Bristol, which straddles the Avon, should be separate from either county. A further attempt to annex part of the north came in 1974 with the creation of the short-lived Avon County Council, dissolved in 1996. It's a largely rural county (Bath excepted) with several ranges of hills (Mendips, Quantocks, Exmoor etc, but also the low lying Somerset Levels. Agriculture and food and drink production, including cider, are important to the economy, but there was also a small coalfield in the area south of Bath, around Radstock, which was worked until the 1970s.

Memories?

One reason for coming this way was that in 1972 I made the first of my ultra-long bus journeys, with a five day ride from my home village of Pembrey in south Wales to East Anglia, where I ended up in Colchester. Day two of that saw me travelling on a Bristol Omnibus service from Bath to Chippenham and I wanted to recreate that, albeit in the opposite direction.  Things were very different then, with no internet or any other easy means of planning bus journeys or arranging overnight accommodation in advance. I just made it all up as I went along, unlike the current trip which has been planned to the last degree before leaving home.

Towns change enormously over fifty years, but I could just about recollect the area around the bus station in Chippenham, where I waited for my next bus. I waited longer than I needed to, because I'd noticed that Faresaver's frequent X31 service was being operated by double-deckers, whereas the first bus I could have caught was a single. I took a chance and waited for the following bus and was duly rewarded. I can't say I remembered anything of the ride to Bath from 50 years ago, but it was very scenic. It was also very busy and one downside of having waited for a later bus was that we caught more of Bath's rush-hour traffic, getting held up in a number of places although actually arriving only a few minutes late at 1700.

Bath is a very impressive city when approached from the east, especially when seen from the top deck of a bus, with its beautiful stone architecture and its terraces of houses lining the hillsides. The city itself was also very busy and it was also raining, for the first time in weeks!  The internet signal to my phone was poor (those hills?) and I couldn't pull up Google Maps to help me find my hotel. Fortunately, the city is also equipped with excellent street plans in the central area.

5th May 2023

Bath to Taunton

I made an earlier than usual start from Bath, taking advantage of the £2 cap on single bus fares that applied throughout England at the time. First's "Mendip Explorer" 174 lived up to its name, with a very hilly route and some fine views from the top deck.

It wasn't all rural and I was initially surprised to see a winding wheel outside the Museum of Coal Mining in Radstock, until I remembered the existence of the small Somerset Coalfield, which was in production until about 1974. Another item of interest was the preserved railway station at Midsomer Norton (South), with was quite remote from the centre of Midsomer Norton itself.

I found Shepton Mallet to be an interesting little place. The bus stops are at the top end of the town, outside a huge out-of-town Tesco. Despite the existence of this the steeply sloping High Street didn't seem to be doing too badly and there was even a small, but busy, market at the far end.

Two views of Shepton Mallet Market (note the market cross above).

The High Street itself is steep and narrow, but at one time, before the construction of the town's by-pass, it was presumably the only way through the town, if the signs on the ancient market cross are anything to go by.

Shepton Mallet High Street

Signs on the market cross that suggest it was once on a through route

After a very pleasant three-quarters of an hour in the town I returned to the bus terminus to catch my next bus of the day. There are literally hundreds of "service 1" bus routes throughout the country, but this "one" belonged to South West Coaches, a new operator to me, and would take me on to Yeovil.

This turned out to be another long, meandering country bus route with not many passengers. It's main point of interest was that it followed the route of part of the old Somerset & Dorset Railway, even passing the site of the famous "Evercreech Junction", which it turns out is a long way from the village of Evercreech (which is a real place!).

Yeovil

Bus passengers arriving in Yeovil get a dreadful first impression of the town. Firstly, the bus station itself is of the old-fashioned cattle market design, with a series of holding pens separating passengers from buses and shelters that can only be used until the bus arrives, after which passengers must queue in the open air to pay the driver, whatever the weather. The bus station cafe has closed down and the bookstall was operating with security screens pulled halfway down its frontage, although whether this was for security reasons or just to keep the wind out was unclear.

Yeovil's "cattle market" style bus station

When leaving the station, the passenger's route is through a semi-derelict shopping centre where nearly every shop has closed down and to cap it all, at least at the time I visited, at the far end of this the street outside was being dug up for redevelopment. What a mess!

The bus passenger's first sight of Yeovil on leaving the bus station!

Things do improve the farther away from the bus station you get and in the end I was glad that I had planned to spend almost a couple of hours in the town. The only disappointment was the promised street market - it was Friday, Market Day, but the market was actually smaller and far less interesting than Shepton Mallet's.

My final bus of the day and of this section of the odyssey, was First's service 54 on to the county town of Taunton. Yet another long, rural route, albeit one that did stick mostly to main roads. We passed through the "roman town" of Ilchester and Somerton "original capital of Wessex" both of which it would have been nice to have been able to spend some time in had the buses been more frequent.

My arrival in Taunton co-incided with the afternoon school time peak and the traffic was bad with the town centre streets choked with cars. The closed down Debenham's store had a display of the town's history in its windows, one panel of which showed town centre traffic in the 1960s "before the motorway temporarily solved the town's traffic problem"

For my part I had a walk around, noting the Somerset County Hall, the much older castle and the 1950s former bus station, now sadly closed, before finding the eway to my hotel.

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