Aveton Gifford

Detached stone and render houses sit along the lanes here, gardens rather than driveways doing the talking, and the sort of quiet that comes from a population you could fit into a couple of coach parties. This is a village in the fullest sense — no high street of note, no queue anywhere, and a median age in the mid-fifties that tells you most of your neighbours have already done the school run elsewhere and moved on to other things.

There's one school in the village, Aveton Gifford CofE Primary, a small academy converter with just over a hundred pupils — the kind of place where a head teacher knows every child's name, though its Ofsted rating isn't listed here so you'd want to visit and judge for yourself. Commuting from Aveton Gifford is not really the pitch: there's no rail station in the picture, and the six transport stops around the village point to a car-based life rather than a platform-and-laptop one. What you're buying into instead is space — detached houses dominate the recent sales, nearly all freehold, and the median sale price of £485,000 sits well above both the South Hams average and the wider national figure, particularly for detached homes where local prices outstrip the national median by a considerable margin. A For Sale board here reads as "family house, paid off, staying put" more often than "starter home."

The green space is modest in scale — a handful of plots totalling under three hectares — but for twenty residents that's still room to breathe, and the crime figures back up the sense of calm: a single recorded incident in the past year, with other theft and against-the-person offences making up the historic caseload at low absolute counts. The safety grade here is the standout, sitting clearly above the rest of the profile, which itself runs a consistent B-plus across health, environment and nightlife — solid without being remarkable. Broadband is a genuine soft spot: only just over half of homes have full fibre, which matters if home working is part of your plan. Day-to-day life leans on nearby towns for shops, healthcare and a wider social scene; this is a place you retreat to, not one you run errands in.