Chauffeur Services in Bangor, County Down

One road matters most: the A2 along the lough shore, through Holywood and Cultra to the Sydenham Bypass and on into the city. Away from the peaks it flows. Inside them, particularly westbound before nine, it does not. The Bangor rail line makes a genuinely good alternative into Belfast, so we often meet guests at the station instead of fighting the traffic both ways. Sea haar settles along this shore in early summer while the roads inland stay clear of it.

South of the town the Ards Peninsula opens out: Mount Stewart on the shore of Strangford Lough, Greyabbey, and the little ferry from Portaferry over to Strangford that turns a dead end into a loop. Give it a full day and you take that circuit, cross the narrows, look at Castle Ward and come home by Downpatrick and Comber with nobody hurried. Ferry timings answer to conditions, so a road alternative is planned and mentioned before you set out.

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.