You're on high, narrow lanes here, hedgebanks close on both sides, a scatter of farmhouses and a small primary school marking the centre of things — this is Exmoor-fringe Devon, not a village with a high street so much as a crossroads with a community around it. Two hundred and seventy-odd people live here, spread thinly across the parish, and the whole feel is agricultural rather than commuter-belt. The one school in the village, East Anstey Primary, is rated Good and has just thirty pupils on its books — the kind of place where your child is known by name from day one, though with numbers that small, year groups will be tiny and some parents look further afield to Bishops Nympton Primary down the road. There's no rail station in the picture, so this is a driving life, full stop: if your work isn't local or homebased, you're commuting by car, and the median age of nearly 56 tells you who's already worked that out and settled here anyway — this is a place people retire to or move to once they're established, not a first rung on the ladder. Housing follows the same logic. Sales here are dominated by semi-detached freehold houses — everything sold recently was freehold, nothing leasehold, which is standard for rural Devon but worth registering if you've only ever bought in a city. Prices sit noticeably above both the national median and North Devon's own average, roughly a quarter higher than the district figure, which is a reminder that "village in Devon" doesn't mean cheap. Green space is present but modest in scale, a handful of small local plots rather than sprawling parkland, so your outdoor life here is more likely to mean the open moor and footpaths beyond the parish than a formal park. The safety picture is genuinely reassuring — this is graded among the safer places you'll find, and with only seven recorded incidents in the past year across the whole area, half of them in the broad "violence and sexual offences" category, the raw numbers are so low that a single event moves the percentages more than they would in a town. Don't read the category label as a pattern; there isn't one to read at this scale. Connectivity is decent too, with two-thirds of properties reaching full fibre broadband, which matters more than it might elsewhere given how much of daily life here happens at home or on the farm rather than on a commute. Health provision and the general environment both come out solidly above the national average, though housing itself is marked down slightly against the area's other strengths — a small tension between how pleasant the place is to live and how easily you can get into that market. This suits people who've made peace with driving everywhere, who want space and quiet over convenience, and who are either past the school-run years or happy with a very small school community. It's a harder sell if you need a station platform or a lively evening out on your doorstep — but if what you're after is a settled, low-crime corner of Exmoor with solid broadband and a strong sense of place, East Anstey delivers that without much pretence about being anything else.