Harcourt

Detached houses on generous plots, gravel drives, hedgerows rather than fences — Harcourt reads as the kind of place people move to once, and then don't leave. There's no crowd to speak of: this is a scattering of homes rather than a high street scene, and the people you do see tend to be older, unhurried, out with a dog or tending a garden rather than rushing for a bus.

The numbers behind that impression are telling. The median age here sits close to sixty, a generation ahead of the national average, and with only one bus stop counted in the whole area, this isn't a place you move to for a car-free commute — you live here because you've already arranged your life around a car, or you've stopped commuting altogether. Schools aren't really the story either; what Harcourt sells is retirement-stage comfort, on a plot big enough to matter. Every recorded sale in the past year was a detached freehold, and the £670,000 median price puts it well above both the Cornwall average and the national one — this is a village where a "for sale" board means a proper house on proper land, not a subdivided terrace.

Day-to-day life here is quiet in the literal sense: green space per head runs above both the regional and national norm, so there's room to walk without seeing another soul, and with a population small enough to count in the dozens, you're never fighting for a table anywhere nearby. That same smallness cuts the other way with the crime figures — the raw count for the year is tiny, but because the base population is so low, the rate compared with the Cornwall average looks dramatic on paper. Look at the actual list and it's a handful of incidents, mostly clustered under one category, in a hamlet where a single reported case moves the percentage a long way. It's a statistical quirk of small numbers more than a lived reality, and the area's own safety grade — comfortably above the national average — reflects that.