How we check things

Bus times change. Mass schedules change. A pansion stops taking cards. Most travel writing is published once and left, and the reader has no way to tell how old the sentence in front of them is.

So the method is the product here, and it is worth writing down.

Every perishable fact is dated

A fare, an opening time, a Mass schedule or a walking time carries three things: when it was checked, who checked it, and when it is next due. All three are visible on the page.

The review date is not decorative. A page past its own review date fails our build and cannot be deployed until somebody has checked it again. That makes accuracy a blocking condition rather than a good intention, and it is why the site will grow slowly.

Walking times say where they came from

A time is marked either measured — somebody walked it, on a named date, and is named for it — or modelled, computed from OpenStreetMap footpath data at a stated pace. The two are never mixed silently, and a modelled time is not allowed to claim things only a person standing there can know, such as whether a route is lit after dark.

Sources are published

Each page lists what it is based on: our own observation, an official timetable, or a named local person. A local source has to be named — "a local told us" is not a source.

Recommendations state their evidence

We cannot stay in every guesthouse in the village, and writing as though we had would be a lie. So every property we list publishes the basis of what we know about it: stayed, visited,owner interviewed, or measured only.

Where the basis is weak, the claims are correspondingly limited — you cannot learn a house's dinner habit from the pavement outside it, so a measured-only entry does not claim one.

Corrections are published, not quietly edited

When something we published turns out to be wrong, or changes, we say so and date it rather than editing the page silently. If you find something wrong, tell us — reports are verified before anything is changed, and the verification is what carries the date.

What we do not publish

• Invented anything. No made-up authors, reviews, testimonials or statistics. Every page names a real person who is accountable for it.
• Ratings or scores. We have no honest way to produce a number out of a handful of visits, and republishing somebody else's score adds nothing you cannot see yourself.
• Live prices or availability. They go stale between updates, and a wrong price is worse than no price. Price bands and fixed charges — the tourist tax, whether cards are taken — are stable enough to publish, and they are dated like everything else.
• Anywhere we have not been. The list grows at the speed of visits.

Where AI is and is not used

Software tooling for this site — the build, the checks that enforce the rules above, the arithmetic behind the daylight and route tables — is written with AI assistance, and drafting and editing may be as well.

No published fact originates from a language model. Times, fares, schedules, distances and opening hours come from observation, from a named source, or from a stated computation over open map data. A named person verifies each one and is credited on the page. A model does not know whether the 06:15 bus ran last Tuesday, and we do not let it pretend to.

Who writes this

Articles here are written by different people, and often more than one person contributes to a single page — a writer, whoever took the photographs, and whoever walked the route. All of them are named in the byline, with what each of them did.