Train or car?

Road time from Moreton in Marsh to Edinburgh is about the same as your train time. Stops would be extra.

Using the M5, the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District are at about the midpoint of the drive. You could make a day of it and see a bit of either one (but not both). If you elect the Lake District, the Castlerigg circle is a freebie.

Using the A1(M), the drive is about thirty minutes longer, but you pass within spitting distance of York.

If you're going to drive to Scotland, you'll obviously need to get the car in London. The drive out to the Cotswolds is only a couple of hours and goes right past Oxford. If you caught it then, you'd have more time for other places.

A rare, balanced view, day, of the train v. car issue from a new poster. I wish more posts were as thoughtful. I hope you stick around, but changing to a human name would make it easier to remember it when writing these comments.

While the penultimate post is certainly balanced, it has some factual and geographical inaccuracies.

Bath, and it's adjacent wards, abuts the Cotswold AONB on three sides, so travel between the two is the matter of crossing the width of a pencil line. Some sources include Bath within the broader definition of the Cotswolds area.

There is no need to travel via London or spend all day on the project. A train to Cheltenham (also adjacent to the AONB) via Bristol takes about an hour. Bath to Moreton in Marsh via Reading takes a couple of hours. Swapping buses for trains within the area is optimal.

You don't need to go all the way to London and back out again to travel Bath to the Cotswolds as you can change at Didcot or Reading. Traveling around the Cotswolds by public transport is limiting though.

Returning to Geri's question: If you're comfortable with left-side driving (and those turns into the wrong lane are probably the worst hazard), then I'd suggest the car, so you can make stops on the way to Edinburgh (York, Durham, ??) if you want. Will the Moreton rental place let you drop it off anywhere else, like York, where you could get a train? Or maybe you could train from London to Oxford, then rent the car and drop it off further north after you've been to the Cotswolds. I don't know the train connections (Nigel is probably working on them now) but it seems a shame to be tied to train schedules just because the Moreton people want to keep their cars close.

I agree with several of the posters here but fundamentally disagree with the poster who claims it takes all day and requires a change in London to go by train. As Ed said, straight up from Bath is the Cotswolds; a short ride on a comfy train to Cheltenham - a pretty nice town itself with lots of gardens, a Pump Room for the waters (the proper name for Cheltenham is Cheltenham Spa), a Promenade, and much much more - is the western gateway to the Cotswolds, right at the foot of the lovely Cleve Hill; and an easy 2 hour ride changing at Reading will give you Moreton-in-Marsh, in the east of the Cotswolds and just a hop skip and a jump from Bourton on the Water, Upper Swell and Lower Swell, Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter, Bourton on the Hill, Stow on the Wold, and many other special places.

It certainly doesn't take all day....

Thank you for all of your suggestions. I didn't even think of going to Oxford first and renting a car there. I will check into that.

Thoughts:

Riding a train and renting a car on the same day is a double cost whammy.

It's not a time whammy if the train comes first, since there's no schedule to pick up the car (the London to Oxford scenario).

It is a time whammy if the train comes last, since you have to allow more time in order not to miss the departure (the dropping up north scenario).

Regardless, every time you change transportation modes you loose more than an hour.

If you get the car at Reading, the drive up the valley to Oxford is pretty good. There's two stations at Reading and I've forgotten the name of both, but car rental places are only close to the easternmost one.

I would check out the price of renting a car in Oxford for the entire trip vs. the cost of train tickets with a short car rental in the Cotswolds. If you keep the car a week, you will probably find it cheaper to do the entire trip by car. I have driven from the Cotswolds to York in a day. It was an easy drive. Edinburgh is not that much further. Of course, I'm accustomed to Texas drives, which can be very long. I don't always make my decisions on a trip wholly based on cost though. I just know I have found a 1 or 2 day car rental to be expensive, and a car is needed in the Cotswolds, so a car for this whole part of your trip may make sense.