We’d made a long loop walking through the hills in the Cotswolds, and the guidebook would have had us crossing a large pasture to get back to the start. At the gate we were confronted by a couple of rowdy young bulls who seemed to have little interest in letting us cross their field, so we took the road instead. Thankfully we could hear cars coming from far away and could position ourselves for maximum visibility in the curves, but it certainly felt like one of the more dangerous miles I’ve ever walked.
On the main topic of this thread, one thing I did note during our two weeks of touring the British countryside was that the network of walking paths and tiny villages made even rural places much more walkable than in the US. One fairly isolated farm we stayed at had a hand drawn guide to getting to multiple nearby-ish pubs via footpaths through the fields. A comparable place in the US would have been 100% car dependent.
It was shocking to me how isolated I was. There was a gas station that I could walk to, but even getting to the fast food place that I could see from my house was dangerous because the neighborhood was surrounded by wide roads and fast cars. Whenever my hosts wanted to get fast food, they'd drive there even though it was literally a stone's throw away.
The wider area was even stranger. A high school that you could only really reach by car. A 'proper' city nearby (Fort Worth) where it seemed like nobody thought to make it accessible to pedestrians. multiple cut-and-paste neighborhoods just like the one I stayed at, completely isolated and only accessible by car. And consistently a Walmart/Kroger's/<random shops> area every 20 mins or so, with one 'bigger' shopping area that had no character or charm but at least it had a movie theater and restaurants.
After that experience I understood why having a car is so crucial in the US, but I also started respecting more how difficult it is to avoid things like obesity or pill addiction. it felt so eery and unnatural.
I used to walk such roads at night.
I was taught, to keep safe:
- Carry a torch (flashlight outside the UK ;-) with good batteries, and don't wear dark clothing. Turn on the torch when you see headlights in the distance, make sure it's pointing somewhere visible.
- Walk on the right-hand side of the road (cars drive on the left in the UK). It's marginal on single-lane country roads but cars still tend towards their normal driving side. Better if you can see surprise vehicles coming towards you rather than from behind you, and they can see you facing them.
- Wear retro-reflective clothing / strips if possible.
As long as cars can see you, they slow down to pass just as they will for a car driving in the opposite direction. Which at night they first recognise by headlights, from quite far away and around corners, so light is what they're looking out for.
Definitely don't be dark, as that makes you invisible to cars at night until very close.
Fortunately/unfortunately that type of road is becoming slightly less prevalent, as efficient modern farming means hedges are maintained less than they were historically and they either get chopped down or neglected and end up growing into larger trees that are much easier to see through.
While I agree that they're bad for sightlines, they're also traditional and may be on private land, so getting rid of them from minor roads would be a hugely unpopular undertaking.
Random example https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/narrow-road-high-hedge-18153...
Not all counties will look like that, but quite a lot of them to. Imagine a network of this kind of roads going on for many miles. You really don't want to walk them at night.