Riding the Daffodil Line around England’s ‘golden triangle’

11.03.2024 - 14:21 / theguardian.com

When Clare Stone’s local bus service was abruptly axed in 2022, she “got quite cross” and co-founded protest group Buses4Us. In the early 20th century, daytrippers used to come by train to see the displays of wild daffodils that carpet the forests and meadows of the so-called “golden triangle” on the Gloucestershire–Herefordshire border. The railway (now long gone) became known as the Daffodil Line. Clare’s group channelled the spirit of the early Victorian investors who had raised the funds to build the railway: “They wanted the railway so they decided to get on and do it themselves,” she tells me. Buses4Us raised money from councils, businesses and individuals and in April 2023 launched a bus called the Daffodil Line (AKA bus 232 or simply “the Daff”).

The original railway also transported harvested wild daffodils to cities such as Birmingham. Now visitors can use the bus to see the flowers still growing along its rural route, which winds between the Herefordshire towns of Ledbury and Ross-on-Wye. Each spring, local villages organise walks, teas and celebratory daffodil weekends.

Besides reconnecting communities, the Daff, which runs seven days a week, with later buses on Fridays and Saturdays, makes an excellent tourist route. The bus passes flowering woods, markets, cider farms, ancient churches and village pubs and will stop by request anywhere safe. I’m here for a weekend at the start of daffodil season to try it out.

Arriving late on Friday afternoon, I catch the Daff to Ross-on-Wye, where I’m staying. I’m one of only two passengers on the single-decker bus with its elegant daffodil logo. On the hour-long £2 journey from Ledbury station, we roll past black-and-white timber-framed cottages and old orchards baubled with mistletoe, as the sun sinks behind sloping vineyards. Cheerful bursts of yellow brighten the verges of villages with names like Upton Bishop and Dymock. This is a landscape linked to a group of writers, including Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke, who gathered here before the first world war and became known as the Dymock Poets.

In the recently refurbished riverside Hope and Anchor (doubles from £80 room only) in Ross, I wake to find snow gently falling and the bare willows outside etched in white. The first Daff of the day reaches the village of Much Marcle in 40 minutes – in time for a monthly produce market at Hellens Manor. There are jars of local honey for sale and giant fresh-baked cheese scones with wild garlic in a picturesque old barn and cowshed. Organic purple sprouting broccoli sits near bunches of hazel leaves, hellebores, pussy willow and scented narcissi from the nearby Ledbury Flower Farmer. The art-filled Tudor manor house fully reopens for tours (£9.50) on 1 April,