People who already owned a house before they got here. Nearly nine in ten households own their home. The typical resident is past sixty. Three in ten households are a single person living alone. The twenty-five to forty-four bracket is the thinnest slice of the lot. This is a village where the big decisions were made years ago and nobody is in a hurry to revisit them.
Tenure is about as settled as English housing gets. Around 86% of homes are owner-occupied, roughly 10% are privately rented and about 3% are social rented. A rental market that small means two things for anyone hoping to try the village before buying into it: very little comes up, and what does comes up rarely stays available long.
The age profile follows from that. The median resident is 62, and only about 13% of people are aged between 25 and 44. The bracket that property marketing likes to call young professionals is the smallest part of this population, which is worth knowing if the plan involves making friends at the school gate rather than over a hedge.
On money, household income across the area ran at about £54,400 gross before tax in the financial year to March 2023, or roughly £41,500 once tax is taken off. That is a modelled figure for a specific past year rather than a live one, and it describes a comfortable rather than wealthy village, which sits oddly alongside the price of getting into it. The explanation is that a lot of purchases here are funded by selling something else rather than by an annual salary.
Household composition tells the same story from another angle. All the population figures on this page come from the 2021 census, and it recorded about 30% of households as one person living alone, with around 21% being a single pensioner household, that latter group being part of the former rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children account for roughly 12% of households and lone parent households for about 5%. Families exist here, they are just outnumbered by people whose children have long since left, and by people who arrived on their own.
Education levels are high without the village feeling like a university town. Around 40% of residents hold a degree-level qualification, about 13% have no formal qualifications at all, and full-time students make up roughly 1% of the population. That spread is fairly typical of a rural Devon parish that has absorbed a couple of decades of professional incomers on top of the people who were already here.
One detail worth noting when reading any of the above: 53 residents live in communal establishments rather than private households, which in a village with two care homes is where a slice of the older population sits. It is a small number against a population of 2,639, and it nudges the age profile rather than driving it.
The people here are one of the more reassuring parts of the picture, with high ownership, high qualifications and low churn producing a village that functions well and knows itself, provided you are content to be among the younger residents for quite a long time.