road trip england

Are you sure about all that?

Absolutely, why shouldn't I be?

Using #3 itinerary, before you do it check a map. Stonehenge and Avebury are close enough to visit both on one day. Then Cotswolds including Warwick, Bath, then south to north through Wales and on to the Lake District. This will avoid you doubling back on at least 2 sections of your route.

Your travel times are optimistic. Have you checked, eg "Kent" (anywhere in particular? - it is a big county) to Avebury or Stonehenge? Canterbury to Stonehenge is at least 3 -4 hours drive. Personally given your interests I would plan at least 2 days 3 nights in York, and if you wanted to include eg. Whitby, or some of the abbeys that fell into disrepair after the reformation such as Fountains Abbey, Rievaulx etc add another night. And I agree with other comments about being very rushed - I think if you did more research you would realise just how packed full of stuff this island is, and how much of it you-ll simply zoom past. Did you intentionally miss out Hadrian's Wall for example?

I'm afraid I agree with the others. There's just too much here. In particular:

• Travel time isn't just the X miles from place A to place B. It's also the checking out of hotel and getting to car park in place A, getting through the traffic in the centre of place A before you reach the main road, and then doing all that process over again in reverse in place B.
• Canterbury, Bath, Durham, York and Warwick are all cities/large towns of a reasonable size. I'd suggest it is almost pointless spending less than a day in any of them - by the time you've arrived, parked, found the place you're staying, eaten, looked at the map and figured out what you want to do next, the day will be over.
• Unless you're going to focus on Cardiff, most of the interesting stuff in Wales is in relatively remote rural areas, where the roads are not quick at all.

So, yeah, trim the number of destinations and spend more time in each. Scotland is an obvious cut but it doesn't have to be that one - for example, the fact that you've said "Kent" and "Wales" suggests to me you may not have specific destinations in mind there either, and just feel obliged to see them? In which case, don't feel obliged. :) (Canterbury is in Kent BTW, anyway.)

Re transport other than hire cars - Uber doesn't have a big presence in much of the UK but there is no shortage of local taxi companies. It's a viable way to travel short distances (so, for example, there is no problem at all turning up in a city without a car and wanting to go somewhere in that same city) - but would be hugely expensive for longer ones.

Train services are pretty good between major cities, or out from cities to smaller places; they can become time-consuming if you need to travel between smaller places that are far apart, because of the time you spend changing trains and waiting around. They're often not cheap, but can be relatively fast.

Bus services are either quite fast and limited in scope (services between major cities, most notably operated by National Express), or they are quite slow, infrequent, and reach numerous small places that the trains don't (local bus services).

The bottom line is that - assuming budget is not a massive consideration - a round-Britain trip by public transport is possible. Use rail for the longest trips then local trains, buses or cabs for the shortest ones. Also bear in mind that for Scotland-to-London, flying is a viable option, though for shorter distances it probably doesn't make much sense time-wise.

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