London to Bath, off at junction 18 and down the A46

The M4 does its job for a hundred and five miles and then hands you to the A46, which runs down off the Cotswold escarpment through Cold Ashton and Swainswick into the valley. It is single carriageway, it carries local traffic, and it takes twenty minutes to cover ten miles.

It is also the best part of the journey. The descent into Bath from the north gives you the whole city at once, honey-coloured and laid out in a bowl, which is the arrival the railway does not offer.

Bath is built on the sides of a valley, and the difference in height between the river and the Royal Crescent is considerable. Everything looks close together on a map and a good deal of it involves a climb.

That matters for where a car stops. A set-down at the bottom near the Abbey is fine if you are visiting the Baths; it is a twenty-minute uphill walk if your hotel is on Lansdown Road. We ask for the address and choose the drop accordingly.

Bath operates a charging zone in the city centre that covers several categories of vehicle. The details have been adjusted since it was introduced and we would rather check what currently applies than quote a figure from memory and be wrong.

Whatever it comes to appears in the written quotation before you travel. That is the only defensible way to handle a charge a passenger cannot verify from the back seat, and it is how we treat every scheme of this kind.

Castle Combe, Lacock, Corsham and Bradford-on-Avon are all within half an hour of Bath and none of them are meaningfully served by rail. The same is true of Longleat, of the villages along the By Brook, and of a great many country houses in between.

For a weekend based in Bath with a day out into the county, the car is what makes the second half possible. It is also why a good proportion of our Bath work is a day rate rather than a transfer.

The stones sit about forty miles south-east of Bath, an hour by the A36 and A303 or across the plain by Warminster. From London it is two hours, which is why our combined Bath and Stonehenge tour runs the day in that order.

For anyone spending a night in Bath, a morning at Stonehenge and an afternoon back in the city is a considerably more relaxed arrangement than the single-day version from London, which is twelve hours of work for the same two visits.