Outside of London, Manchester, Nottingham and a few selected other places, busses in England tend to be fairly dire, especially as you get out to smaller towns and villages.
Even if the routes are there, it's not uncommon for the actual busses to bare little resemblance to the published timetable.
In some places you'll get fancy live information screens which happily announce the arrival of a bus that doesn't exist, or more frequently, to simply state that the information isn't available, please check the paper boards.
Bus routes tend to be especially bad in rural towns and villages, but even in my fairly reasonably large town, it's quicker and more convenient for me to walk the 1.3 miles to the train station than try to get a bus.
If I plug in "bus" on google maps planner, it has me walk 20 minutes to a bus stop to sit on a bus for 7 minutes, versus a ~25 minute walk.
Alternatively, I could walk 5 minutes to a nearer stop, wait 30 minutes for the next bus, which itself then takes 26 minutes to get to the bus station, which is itself a 3-4 minute walk from the bus station to the train station itself.
And that's assuming the bus is on time running to schedule, and doesn't then hit traffic.
I'd also be paying £3 one-way for this privilege.
Once you're inside the TFL zone everything changes and busses are frequent, generally reliable, and cheaper.
