> "It's unfortunate that the ancient Britons built Stonehenge pretty much exactly where you'd want a motorway from Exter to London to run."

I remember seeing a documentary once that argued this was no accident. Stonehenge was a site meant to be visited, centrally located and easy to access. The route of the A303, more or less, has likely existed since ancient times, pre-dating Stonehenge.

The only thing worse than the railways in the South West are the railways everywhere other than the South East.

As I don't have a car, the South West is really the only part of Great Britain that I haven't explored.

Really wish we could build some decent rail infrastructure out there...

To be fair you can actually get to most part of the south west by train, it's just slow. As someone whose parents live in that part of the world I'd definitely appreciate faster trains though.

The train to Bath and Bristol (from London) is sufficiently good to use as a daily commuter if necessary (I’ve done it from Bath in the past even before the 2019 schedule reworking), but going anywhere further south west by train is pretty miserable. It’s particularly sad if you look at the pre-Beeching map and consider what could have been there instead.