Detached houses behind hedgerows, gravel drives, barely another soul about — West Stour reads as farmhouse country rather than village-in-the-conventional-sense, and with a population in the teens rather than the thousands, that impression is accurate rather than atmospheric. The property picture and the people picture are the same picture here. Eight recorded sales, seven of them detached, all freehold, with a median price around £461,000 — comfortably above both the national £281,000 and Dorset's own £335,000, some 38% above the county benchmark. A median age pushing 57 confirms who's buying: this is a place people move to once they're established, not a first-rung or a commuter dash. There's one primary in view, Stower Provost Community School, small at under 90 pupils, the kind of school where your child is a name, not a number — though no inspection grade is on record to lean on either way. Green space here is a single, modest patch rather than parkland to roam, and with only two transport stops and no rail count to speak of, daily life is car-dependent almost by design — this is a place you drive from, not walk through. Full-fibre broadband reaching 70% of premises is the quiet compensation: it's the kind of village where working from the study is more realistic than working from an office. The grade pattern reinforces a settled, comfortable place — safety, nightlife, and transport all rated well above the national average — but health sits a notch lower than the rest, worth a passing thought if that's a priority. The crime figures need context: with so few residents, a handful of incidents produces headline percentages that look startling against Dorset's rate but reflect a tiny sample rather than a lived pattern of danger. This suits someone past the school-run scramble, wanting space, quiet, and a decent internet connection more than a high street or a station platform. It won't suit anyone wanting bustle, choice of neighbours, or a walk-to-everything routine — there isn't a "everything" here to walk to. The trade-off is straightforward: you're paying a premium for detachment, in every sense of the word, and the regret risk is really about isolation tolerance rather than money or safety.