Tetbury of the Cotswolds, and UK Driving

Opportunities can come from unlikely places. I had one arise from the five-hour difference between check-out and check-in times for typical Airbnbs. I had rented my car in Bristol, used it to move to Bath and to drive around the Cotswolds, and finally to move to Oxford where I would return the car. Bath to Oxford is only about an hour, so I was able to put those four surplus hours to use by visiting a randomly-selected Cotswolds town that could be considered sort of on the way. I glanced at a map, selected a dot, and it turned out to be Tetbury.

My hope was to spend a few hours to get the vibe of a non-tourist Cotswolds (AONB) town, to see what it is like to be an ordinary Englishman living in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The three pictures above show typical streets, each a bit further than the one before it from the center of the city.

Right in the center of the city was a fantastic visitor center (so much for not being a tourist town) but I was the only customer around on this cold, drizzly day in March. She was able to tell me a bit about the church across the street, and tell me if there were any Catholic churches in town. (If anyone has figured out how to get Google Maps to tell you where Catholic churches are, please let me know. No combination of double-quotes or minus signs has worked for me.) But first, I got coffee and a pastry at the amazing Cotswolds Coffee Bar:

By the time I was finished dining beneath this artwork I was nearly prepared to purchase it just so I could straighten it out; but £165 is a clucking lot of money for a fowl Tetburean triptych. Even so, the fare was wonderful. Here are two churches:

The church in the first pictures is called Saint Mary the Virgin and Saint Mary Magdalen (CE); the church in the third is Saint Michael’s (RC). Today’s puzzle is to figure out inside which of those the second picture was taken. I suspect that the RC population of Tetbury is much smaller than that of its CE brethren.

Back in Bath I was staying in a house at the top of a hill, and my typical walk from City Centre was about 1.5 miles along a road that climbed gradually up that hill. But for an adventure I walked around to the part of the hill below the house, and used Google Maps to find a walking path up the steep side of the hill.

When I got here it was telling me to walk toward that red car, and I was very puzzled. Somehow, Google Maps knows all about walking paths where cars can’t go, in addition to the streets where they can. I don’t know about the rest of England, but these towns in the south have lots of these narrow passageways – alleys between houses – which are open to the public. Do you see the passageway in the picture above?

Tetbury had lots of these. Here are a few such passages I encountered during my more-or-less random exploration:

So, what is the vibe of a typical Cotswolds village? Assuming that most of the folks I met were not tourists, then it seems to be pleasant, clean, friendly, and beautiful indeed. The village was very walkable, not large, a well-done mix of old and new.

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Advice for Driving in England

By the time I returned my car in Oxford I had driven 291 miles in the UK, and I have some observations that may help if you’re thinking of being a new UK driver some day.

• Driving on the left side of the road is not the greatest difference between US and UK driving. The greatest difference is the definition of “lane.” In the US, if you are driving in a lane, then you have that lane. For the most part, you can expect no other cars, bikes, trucks, buses, yaks, pedestrians to enter it. In England, that is simply not true. Many, many, many streets are just a single lane for two-directional traffic to share. So you have to be polite when you drive. And go slow. In general people are, and do, and it works. In cities bikes, buses, and cars all share lanes, and again politeness and going slow are required.
• Driving on the left side does require non-stop attentiveness, it is true. But that’s such a large consideration that I never forgot it, even in my knee-jerk reactions. The two observations below were much more subtle.
• When you turn, you should turn into the left lane. For some reason, this was much less automatic than simply staying on the left side.
• Everyone else is also driving on the left side. Again, obvious; but it required constant attention, when encountering a cross street, to know the proper place to look for oncoming traffic.
• Roundabouts (traffic circles) abound. In country driving, expect an average of one of these per mile. There are no stop signs. Occasionally there are traffic lights. The admonition above – to keep in mind that other drivers are also driving on the left side – is particularly important at roundabouts. Frank and Dympna from Ireland gave me the best advice here: If you’re going more than one exit in the roundabout, get into the inside lane.
• “Dual carriageway” means two lanes on a highway, going in your direction. That one took me a while to get.

Finally, go slow. Most of Oxford has a speed limit slower than most US school zones, and London is 30mph, and yet traffic moves.