Chauffeur Services in Abergavenny

Improved in stages across many years, the A465 Heads of the Valleys road running west towards Merthyr Tydfil can still cost you time around Gilwern and Brynmawr without a great deal of warning. Bound for Cardiff, we would normally drop south instead on the A4042 through Pontypool and pick up the M4 near Cwmbran, a line that reads longer on paper and drives quicker in practice. Northbound for Brecon, the A40 through Crickhowell is both the pleasant route and, as it happens, seldom the slow one.

Visitors underestimate the weather here. Take the Gospel Pass above Llanthony: highest road in Wales, glorious in June, and no place for a saloon once snow has fallen or rain has gone on for days, so we say as much instead of trying it. Then there is food festival weekend, when streets in the centre close and the car parks are full by mid morning. Collections that weekend go just outside the cordon, and you get the precise spot confirmed the day before.

On a long journey, Britain's weather does more damage than its traffic ever will. Winter afternoons close in early, and that matters a great deal when the final leg is a single-track road. Highland and moorland routes can run substantially longer than any summer estimate suggests. Those allowances go into the timings from the start, rather than being discovered together halfway up a glen. Where a departure hour makes the schedule uncomfortable, we propose a better one.

Demand tracks the calendar closely. Bank holiday weekends fill fast, so do the weeks either side of Christmas, the summer wedding season and those university terms that all begin and end together. The further from London a journey runs, the sooner a car wants committing to it. Midweek travel in the shoulder months, by contrast, is the easiest thing in the world to arrange.