3rd May 2023
Worcester, Hereford and Gloucester are all very close together and Gloucester can still be reached from Hereford on a single bus ride. This gave me time for a good look round my former home town in the morning and also to follow a less direct route to Gloucester in the afternoon.
Unusually, I retraced my steps, returning to Ledbury not just on the same service, DRM's 476, but the very same bus that I had used yesterday. I was coming this way to sample a rare example of a community-funded bus service where local people have got together to provide a bus service to villages left without one when the commercial operator pulled out and the county councils involved refused to provide a replacement.
DRM Bus service 232, branded the "Daffodil Line" after the railway line that followed part of the route until the 1960s, is a proper bus service, with a full timetable seven days a week including evening journeys at the weekend. It replaces former Stagecoach services from Ledbury (132) and Ross-on-Wye (32) to Gloucester, which that company truncated at Newent during the Covid pandemic. Funding has been obtained by a group of concerned individuals from parish councils, various grants and from local people via crowdfunding websites.
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| Service 232 approaching Ledbury Market House and its waiting passengers |
I had read that timekeeping was a problem on the route and notices at the bus stop acknowledged this and blamed it on extensive roadworks taking place on the route. I wasn't surprised therefore that despite an on-time departure we were 25 minutes late arriving at Ross-on-Wye. What did surprise me was that none of that was due to roadworks, it being all down to over-ambitious timetabling. Since my visit I have learned that a new timetable will soon be introduced to address this issue.
Fortunately, I didn't have a tight connection at Ross and still had time for a wander around this pleasant Herefordshire market town before moving on on Stagecoach's service 33 to Gloucester on what was the first double-decker I'd been able to use on the trip since arriving in Cheltenham from Witney back in February. Leaving Ross on the A40, we soon reached the county boundary at Lea Line and, for the second time, entered Gloucestershire. After a diversion via Mitcheldean we rejoined the A40 at Huntley, after suffering significant delay due to roadworks at the junction and arrived at Gloucester at 15:45. This meant an earlier finish to the day than usual, but I wanted to stay overnight in the county town and was also looking forward to a night in the New Inn, an ancient half-timbered inn in the centre of the city that has been welcoming travellers for centuries and which although often being described as a "coaching inn" actually predates the coaching era by many years. I wasn't disappointed.
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| The courtyard of the New Inn, Gloucester |
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