Oncoming Vehicles in Middle of Road

This is a warning sign that nicely summarizes driving in the UK.

Aside from the challenges of driving on the left in a right-hand drive vehicle, drivers new to the UK must contend with a number of challenges:

First, there is lots of traffic. You almost never have stretches of highway to yourself. There are usually other cars around and most of them seen to be right behind you, materializing from nowhere!

Roads can be very narrow. In some cases, this means the width of a back alley in most cities or towns in Canada. Even if the road is nominally 2 lane, houses and other buildings are built right out to the edge of the street (obviously before the advent of minimum setback rules) and on-street parking is common, so any hope of having 2 lanes evaporates quickly. One gets adept at weaving in and out, giving way to oncoming traffic and powering ahead when an oncoming vehicle pulls over and flashes it’s lights to indicate that they’re letting you go first. There are long stretches of road in Scotland and rural England/Wales that are basically single lane roads with "passing places".

In some areas, stone walls and/or hedgerows can be at least 6 feet high so driving down a narrow road or lane can be more like driving along a tunnel with the hedges or stone walls making it impossible to see anything to either side.

In general, drivers should abandon any ideas they might have of simply pulling over if there is a need to consult a map, take a picture or generally collect oneself. There is seldom any place to pull over. Usually, your only option is to keep going.

Many "intersections" in the UK are handled by "roundabouts", the (in)famous traffic circle. These have been tried in North America but mostly abandoned in favour of traffic lights. In the UK, they are everywhere. Once you get the hang of them, they are fine. In fact, they have one advantage, especially when there are several road directions all converging at one roundabout and when you really don't have any idea which one to take. With the roundabout, you just keep going round and round until you finally figure it out and then bail out at the appropriate exit.

We did drive on stretches of "motorway" or "dual carriageway", but we tended to avoid such roads in favour of the country lanes and smaller highways through more interesting terrain.

In any case, the roads were better and somewhat less winding than New Zealand's and we survived without a scratch on the rental car, a measure of success, I suppose.