The bus passed me about forty minutes before I got to the town, and I was genuinely annoyed about it. Not at the driver. At myself, for a decision I had made three hours earlier at a junction where the road split and I took the side without a bus stop on it. My shirt was stuck to my back. I had eaten the last of my bread standing against a fence post, because sitting down at that point felt like a commitment I would not be able to reverse.
I got in around four. What I want to be honest about is that I arrived worse: slower, hungrier, less able to talk to anyone. And also that I knew something the people on the bus did not, which is how the ground falls toward the water on that side, and where the wind comes from, and at what point the buildings stop being sheds and start being houses. I had watched all of it come at me for four hours. They had clean shirts. Both of those things are true and neither one cancels the other.
On foot, arrival is a gradient
When you come in by bus or train, arrival is an event. There is a moment before you are there and a moment after, and a door opens between them. On foot there is no door. The place starts leaking toward you a long way out. First the rubbish at the roadside gets denser. Then there are dogs behind gates. Then a shelter with a timetable in it, then a school, then a sign with the name on it, by which point you have already been arriving for an hour.
This does something to your sense of scale that I have not found another way to get. You know how big the place is because you felt where it stopped. You know it is somewhere people leave from, because you walked along the road they leave on. That is not mystical. It is information you pick up from being at ground level for long enough, and there is no shortcut to it.
The cost is real, and it is mostly your evening
Here is what walking in costs. It costs your evening. You arrive with your legs full of concrete and your judgement noticeably worse, and the first two hours go on logistics that would otherwise take twenty minutes: water, somewhere to sit, working out whether the one open kitchen stops serving at eight or nine. I have walked into towns and then been too tired to leave the room again, which means I traded the town for the road leading to it.
Sometimes that trade is good. If the road was interesting and the town is a dozen streets, fine, no loss. If the town was the reason I came, walking in was a mistake, and I have made that mistake more than once because I liked the picture of myself doing it.
Riding in gives you the place at full strength
The other case deserves a fair hearing. If you step off a bus at two in the afternoon with fresh legs, you have the whole rest of the day at full power. You can walk the place properly, which is a completely different activity from walking to it. You can go down the same street three times until you understand it. You can still be curious at six in the evening, which in small towns is roughly when anything happens, instead of lying down.
I think of attention as a daily budget. There is a fixed amount of it and the approach can eat most of it before you arrive. When there is something specific I want to look at, I spend nothing on getting there and everything on being there.
It changes who you are to the people there
This part I am least sure of, but I keep noticing it. If you turn up on foot from the direction of nowhere in particular, people ask a different first question. Not where are you from. Where did you come from, meaning today, meaning by which road. It is a practical question with a practical answer, and it starts a conversation about the ground rather than about you.
I do not want to oversell this. Half the time nobody asks anything and I get a nod, or not even that. But arriving covered in road dust puts you in a category people can read: someone who came the stupid way. In places where hardly anyone arrives at all, being readable is worth something.
How I decide now
What I use is not a principle, it is a check with two questions. First: is the walk the thing, or is it just access? If it is access, and the route is a hard shoulder with lorries on it, I ride. Nothing is gained from four hours of diesel and one metre of gravel.
Second: what time will I get in, and what do I want to do afterwards? If the answer is anything more demanding than eating and sleeping, I ride at least part of the way. I have started doing hybrids, which feel like cheating and are not. Ride most of it, get off at the last village before, walk the final hour in. You get the gradient without the wreckage, and you still see where the place stops.
What I would say if you asked
Walking in is not a better way to travel. It is a different transaction, and an expensive one. You pay in hours, in food, in the quality of your evening, and sometimes in a blister that affects the next three days. What you get is a physical sense of where the place sits, an understanding of its edges, and an arrival with no door in it.
Some days that is worth the price and some days it plainly is not. The only way I have found to tell in advance is to be honest about what I am actually after. When I am not honest, I walk half a day to prove something to nobody, and then fall asleep at half past eight with the light still on.