Princetown

Princetown sits high on Dartmoor, and the moor is the first thing you register — stone terraces and squat granite cottages built to shrug off weather, with the prison walls still the largest man-made feature on the skyline. This isn't a place that pretends to be anything else: it's remote, weather-hardened, and visibly built for a working, moorland life rather than a commuter one.

There's no rail station here and the transport stops are modest, so getting to and from Princetown means a car, full stop — a point worth sitting with if you're used to trains. What the village does have is Princetown Community Primary School, rated Good and small enough that "48 pupils" tells you most of what you need to know about class sizes and playground gossip alike. The median age of 47 points to a settled, older population rather than a stream of young families, and the housing stock backs that up: sales here skew terraced and overwhelmingly freehold, with a £350,000 median that actually runs above the West Devon average by nearly a fifth — a reminder that moorland scarcity can push prices up even in a village this size. A For Sale board here usually means a solid stone terrace, owned outright, not rented or leasehold.

The green space count undersells it — six pockets of registered green space sound modest until you remember the entire village is a doorstep to open moorland, which is really the whole point of living here. Day-to-day amenities are thin on the ground; this is a one-shop, one-pub sort of place, and you fill your Saturday with a walk out to the tors rather than a restaurant crawl. Crime is genuinely low in absolute terms — the numbers are small enough that categories like violence or anti-social behaviour swing heavily on a handful of incidents — and the safety grade reflects that: as safe as anywhere in the piece, sitting alongside strong marks for health and transport access to wider services. The one grade that doesn't fit the pattern is connectivity, a middling mark that tracks with the broadband reality (fibre reaches roughly six in ten homes) and the sense of being some distance from anywhere else.