Twenty-four miles there and back is one hell of a hike to your local jobcentre. But when Ray Taylor, 56, had his benefits cut for 13 weeks after illness meant he missed an appointment to sign on, he had no option but to get out his walking shoes. He doesn’t have friends with cars to give him a lift, and with no money coming in, he couldn’t pay the £7 bus fare from the small Cambridgeshire town of Ramsey to Huntingdon, where he is registered for benefits. And if he missed signing on again, he would be sanctioned again.

Taylor, a former electrician – he couldn’t afford to update his qualifications after being made redundant and going freelance – is remarkably stoical about what could be a weekly trek. “If you’ve got a 9 o’clock appointment, you have to set off in the early hours to make sure you get there,” he says. There have been “quite a few times” he has set off at two in the morning to avoid penalties for lateness. (“Sanctions” can involve benefits being reduced – or stopped entirely.)

A pre-dawn start in the pitch-black of rural Cambridgeshire with cars and farm lorries rumbling along pavement-less roads doesn’t sound all that safe. Taylor, who survived being homeless in Cambridge for seven years before being housed in Ramsey, smiles as his eyes stream from the cold. “There’ve been a few moments.” The police have picked him up a couple of times and taken him home to ensure his safety, he recalls.

Come the end of March, other Ramsey residents may have to embark on this trudge that is nearly the length of a marathon. That is because the No 30 bus that is the sole public transport link between Ramsey and Huntingdon is due to be cut. The only alternative for anyone without a car will be to beg lifts from friends or family, cycle or find the £40 round-trip taxi fare. It is an impossible sum for anyone on a low income, and even most working people couldn’t find it five days a week.

To experience the route Taylor has walked “oh, maybe 20 or 30 times”, we meet at the more civilised hour of 8am by the decorative wrought-iron bus shelter next to Ramsey’s clocktower. The night before, driving across Cambridgeshire, gusts of wind hurling rain across my windscreen, I begin to dread the walk to come. Morning, however, has dawned bright but chilly. Hoiking our rucksacks on our backs, we pull our hats down and head south out of town. We are accompanied by Steve Corney, the town council’s new mayor, and Jane Sills, the chair of the Ramsey Million Big Local residents group, which has campaigned for the past 18 months against the cutting of the No 30 bus.

“For the people here, the bus means everything,” says Corney over the noise of traffic streaming out of Ramsey. There are no big employers in the town, so there is a daily exodus. “It’s frustrating because when you see it, there’s a lot of people on it.” Corney notes too that housing development means Ramsey’s population of 8,000 is expanding.

The Huntington to Ramsey bus. Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Guardian

We pick up the pace as we reach the edge of town, where Corney peels off. As we march past a long-abandoned RAF station, it is the isolation suffered by older people and teenagers in cut-off rural areas that is on Jane Sills’ mind. James Palmer, the mayor of the new Cambridgeshire and Peterborough combined authority, which is reviewing all the area’s bus routes, will visit Ramsey later this month, and Sills’ group of residents intends to lobby him hard. “He should know by now just how important it is for people on low incomes and for young people that they’re not trapped in a small town with their life chances inhibited,” she says.

Sills has a strong card up her sleeve. As well as marshalling a petition that gained more than 1,000 signatures – and secured a short-term stay of execution for the route – members of her group decided to use some of the Big Local Lottery money they had been awarded to strengthen their case. A report commissioned from the Campaign for Better Transport revealed that the local authority subsidy paid to the bus operator Stagecoach to run the No 30 bus is the lowest of any on the list of proposed route closures in Cambridgeshire.

The report also showed, Sills says, “how Ramsey already compares poorly to other parts of the county” in terms of its access to buses.

If Cambridgeshire’s long-term transport strategy is ratified later this year – it is the new Cambridgeshire and Peterborough combined authority, not Ramsey town council, that will set commissioning policy until 2031 – Ramsey will be cut off from the new “hub and spoke” public transport system. There will be no buses in or out at all.

Ramsey’s residents, of course, are not alone in their plight. The Campaign for Better Transport calculates that since 2010, councils in England and Wales have cut £182m – 45% – from the support they give to bus routes that would otherwise be unsustainable. Some areas have seen particularly harsh cuts: Somerset by 50%, Leicestershire by 72%, North Yorkshire by 81%. In the past year alone, according to the charity’s recent Buses in Crisis report, more than 300 routes have been reduced or withdrawn in England and Wales, and 3,347 since 2010.

“Whole areas are now transport deserts,” says the charity’s chief executive, Darren Shirley. “The people who are the most impacted are those who are most in need of public transport. Jobseekers who are reliant on public transport to get to work. People in poor health who need it to get to hospital.” Buses, he points out, are the only form of transport in England not to have a long-term investment strategy.

We walk past fields of sugar beet, along straight, flat roads, and through the villages of Upwood, Great Raveley and Kings Ripton – just over halfway – where we sink thankfully on to a bench in front of St Peter’s church. Munching on cereal bars, I ask Taylor if he has had any job offers that would mean he didn’t have to keep signing on at the Huntingdon jobcentre.

“There are one or two jobs out there for me, but I think what puts a lot of people off is that employers know what the bus situation is in Ramsey,” he says, with some frustration. “I’ve had offers but I couldn’t get there for the start times.” The existing three-hourly bus service runs only in the daytime, so he can’t do shift work into the evening or overnight. It is suddenly obvious how reducing rural buses to a skeleton service prevents people who could work from holding down a job.

The bus stop. Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Guardian

“We’re starting to undermine the fabric of the places that are more isolated,” says Nigel Wilcock, the executive director at the Institute of Economic Development. “The figures on how much money has been lost by local authorities are staggering. Councils are almost faced with: ‘Do we provide adult social care or do we keep bus routes going?’” When it comes to rural transport, Wilcock says: “Campaigns now have got to be about addressing the funding settlement from central government.”

As we tramp onwards, it is becoming obvious that this isn’t a walk that should be done by anyone who is not in decent physical nick, and with sharp hearing and eyesight to boot. Although Sills’ Ordnance Survey skills take us along back roads, away from Taylor’s usual path (he follows the bus route, a good stretch of which is on the busy A141), we still have to keep jumping on to the muddy verge, taking care not to end up in deep drainage ditches which run alongside the fields, to avoid cars and tractors.

About 10 miles in, as we pass Jubilee Park, the home of Huntingdon Town FC, Sills’ hips are starting to hurt. Taylor’s ankle, which he sprained badly a couple of years ago, is twingeing. My left ankle too – a weak point – is feeling crunchy. At 12.25pm, aching and hungry, we reach Huntingdon’s council offices where, because he is being switched over to universal credit, Taylor must sign on every week. His only consolation is that this will eventually become every fortnight.

It has taken just over four hours to do 10.8 miles – Sills’ nifty navigation has nibbled a mile off Taylor’s usual route – and nobody fancies a return trip via shanks’s pony, with the light failing halfway through. Today, of course, there is a bus that can take us back to Ramsey. So we head to the bus station, where we meet Ramsey resident Rosetta Casey, 75, who is waiting for the No 30 after a day’s shopping.

Casey hasn’t heard that the route is due to be axed. She throws up her hands in dismay. “I can’t live here without it. I can’t drive.” She shakes her head vigorously. “I’ll be stuck in Ramsey then. What are we doing to do?”

On the bus, Sally Greaves, 58, says her son, who has special needs, uses the service four days a week to get to college. “He’s doing a gardening course. He needs the early bus in the morning. He knows this route and if they disrupt it, he’ll struggle.”

As we zoom down the A141, 20-year-old single mother Knickita Crampton rocks 16-month-old George in his pushchair. Crampton travels into Huntingdon five days a week to visit her family after the council housed her in Ramsey, where she knows hardly anyone. Without the bus, she says: “I wouldn’t be able to see my mum. She doesn’t drive, and I can’t afford a taxi.”

With no more money in the local government pot – in fact with cuts still to come – what can be done to bolster threatened rural bus services? Shirley cites the Total Transport pilots that launched in 2015. This funded 37 rural and isolated areas to work out ways of combining various public agencies’ transport budgets and timetables. School buses sit for hours not being used, he observes. The NHS spends a fortune getting patients to appointments, costs that only increase when rural bus services disappear. An estimated £2bn, he says, is being spent annually on public transport services that are not joined up. Instead, says Shirley: “If you design a service to meet the collective needs of the community you can create efficiencies. Local authorities should be talking to the clinical commissioning groups, to people who commission school transport … all of these teams should be working together to design a more integrated system.”

An hour after getting on in Huntingdon, our little walking band disembarks the No 30. Ray is hoping he doesn’t have to do the walk again every fortnight, rain or shine, if the bus gets cut – but he will if he has to, he says with a resigned grin.

That may be all right for now – it may even keep him fit – but the idea of Knickita Crampton pushing her toddler son to Huntingdon and back is clearly ludicrous, as is the notion of Rosetta Casey taking to the roads into her late 70s. With no bus service, they, and many others in this village, will, as Sills fears, be trapped.