Settled people who already own their house. Three in four households are owner-occupiers. The middle of the age range sits at fifty. Only about one household in five is a couple with children at home. This is not a village filling up with young families. It is a village that filled up once and largely stayed put.
At the 2021 census, which is the source for every population figure here, about 74% of households owned their home, 14% rented privately and 11% rented from a social landlord. In a place this size, a private rental sector of that scale is not a market so much as a handful of cottages somebody inherited and could not quite bring themselves to sell. If you are hoping to rent your way in and look around for a year first, the queue is short because the supply is shorter.
The age profile follows from that. The median resident is fifty, and about 20% of people fall in the twenty-five to forty-four band. That is the age group most housing strategies are built around, and this village quietly manages without a great many of them. Nobody here is going to be startled by a quiet Tuesday.
On money, household income modelled by the Office for National Statistics came to roughly £60,000 gross for the financial year to March 2023. That is before tax, it describes that year rather than this one, and it is modelled across an area wider than the village itself. Comfortable, then, without being the sort of number that explains a second home in the Quantocks.
Household shapes are where the character really shows. Around 30% of households are one person living alone, and 19% of all households are a pensioner living alone, that second figure sitting inside the first rather than beside it. About 19% are couples with dependent children and roughly 7% are lone parents. So the school-gate crowd and the living-alone crowd are close to the same size, which is not the arrangement the phrase family village usually conjures.
Education splits in a familiar rural way. About 37% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, roughly 14% hold none at all, and about 2% are full-time students. That is a wide spread of qualifications rather than a uniform one, and both ends of it drink in the same pubs.
Health reports well. Around 82% of residents describe their health as good or very good, with about 4% describing it as bad or very bad. Across Somerset as a whole, and this is a county-level comparison rather than the village's own, preventable mortality sits better than the England average and smoking runs at about 11%, which is similar to England. Those are figures about a large local authority, not a verdict on anybody's lane.
The population here is ordinary in most respects and older in the one that shapes everything else: who your neighbours are, how quiet the street is at four in the afternoon, and how long you wait for another family to move in. Buy accordingly.