Whitchurch Canonicorum is the kind of place where the houses do the talking: mostly detached, mostly stone or render, sitting on plots big enough that you don't hear your neighbour's radio. There's no high street to speak of in the retail sense, and that's rather the point — this is a scattered farming parish more than a settlement, and it attracts people who've already decided they don't need a town centre. Housing here is almost entirely freehold and detached, and the numbers back up what you'd guess just looking at it: a median sale price around £422,500 against Dorset's £335,000 puts it a good deal pricier than the county norm, let alone the national one. Fourteen sales is a small enough sample that you shouldn't read too much into the exact figure, but the pattern — big freehold houses, virtually no flats or new build — is consistent and tells its own story. Schools are a genuine trade-off: the two named primaries in the sample, Marshwood CofE and Thorncombe St Mary's, are both rated Requires Improvement, which sits oddly against an otherwise comfortable picture and is worth sitting with before you commit if you've got young children. There's no rail station in the data for this parish, so this is a driving life, not a commuting one, and the median age of late fifties suggests most people here have already made their peace with that. Green space is modest in raw terms — two named plots, under a hectare between them — but that undersells a parish where the countryside itself is the amenity; you don't visit a park here, you live inside one. The crime figures need a health warning: with a population this small, the raw counts (single figures in most categories) swing the percentages wildly, and the eye-catching "8,000%+ above Dorset" comparison is really just what happens when you divide small numbers by a tiny denominator — the safety grade of A is the more trustworthy signal, and it says what you'd expect from the setting. Full-fibre broadband reaching seven in ten properties is a pleasant surprise for somewhere this rural, and matters more day to day than most of the crime arithmetic. This suits people who've made an active choice against convenience — retirees, remote workers, those wanting land and quiet over footfall and choice. It doesn't suit anyone who wants a walkable school run, a station platform, or much in the way of nightlife beyond what you bring yourself. The trade-off is plain rather than hidden: space and calm against distance and thin local schooling, and whether that troubles you says more about your own life than about the village.