Salcombe

Down by the water, the boats outnumber the cars in most people's mental picture of Salcombe, and the estate agents' windows do a fair bit of the talking: detached homes with sail lofts and gig sheds, freehold nearly everywhere, and prices pitched well above what the same bricks would fetch inland. This is a village that skews older and comfortable rather than young and stretched — the median age sits close to 61, a couple of decades above the national figure — and the streets read accordingly: gilets rather than school-run scrums, gallery windows rather than bookies.

There's only one school actually in the village, Salcombe Church of England Primary, a small academy of around a hundred pupils, and the nearest larger options sit outside it — so families tend to be the sort who've already worked out secondary schooling elsewhere, or who don't need to think about it at all. Housing tells the same story: a typical sale here is a detached freehold house, and at a median of £450,000 (with the top quarter of sales pushing past £755,000) it's a market for people arriving with equity rather than a mortgage stretch, sitting a good 26% above the wider South Hams figure. Public transport is thin on the ground in the way you'd expect of a peninsula village — the 23 local stops matter more than any rail option, so most people here drive, and the appeal is the place itself rather than the commute out of it.

The green space is modest but present — 17 pockets of it, even if the total hectarage is compact for the population size — and the pull for a free afternoon is the water and the coast path rather than a park bench. Health provision reads unusually well for a village this size, and the safety grade matches it: overall crime sits low, though violence and sexual offences make up a disproportionate 40% of what there is, worth knowing rather than worrying over given the small base numbers involved. House prices have been essentially flat over the past year, neither rising to justify excitement nor falling enough to matter, which suits a market built on lifestyle buyers rather than speculation.