Chauffeur Services in Wells

Late June turns the place upside down. A few miles east, the festival at Pilton throws very heavy traffic onto the A39, the A361 and the lanes around Shepton Mallet and West Pennard for the best part of a week, with queues building on the approach days and a long, slow exit once it is over. Castle Cary station acts as the rail gateway and gets extremely busy. We plan for the whole week, not just the weekend, and we say plainly when a journey has to start a great deal earlier than usual.

Mendip roads have a character all their own. Climbing out of Wells towards Priddy and the Gorge, the gradients are steep and the bends sharp; Cheddar Gorge is narrow and, in season, thick with walkers and cyclists; and winter puts ice, sometimes snow, on the higher stretches long after the lowland roads have cleared. For a first flight from Bristol we would leave Wells about an hour and three quarters ahead, more when the weather is poor.

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.