Very good, and it is comfortably the best thing about living here. Green space starts about four hundred metres from the average front door. Water is closer still, with dozens of stretches of it inside a kilometre. Better than a third of the area sits inside a protected landscape. Nobody has ever moved to this valley for the shopping.
Postcodes across the area average about 8 pieces of public green space within a kilometre, with the nearest about 430 metres away. That is not one park at the end of a bus route being asked to carry a whole town. It is a scatter of them in every direction, which is what happens when the fields begin before the street names have finished.
Water beats green on proximity. The nearest blue space averages about 290 metres from the typical postcode, with roughly 30 separate stretches of it within a kilometre. The River Coly runs through the middle of the town, and the coast is close enough to matter: the nearest postcode sits about 555 metres from it, with a median across the area of about 2.2 kilometres.
For getting out into any of it under your own steam, the National Cycle Network averages about 1.7 kilometres away, and about 39% of postcodes sit close to it. The other 61% start with a lane and a decision.
The retail picture is small and unbothered about it. The rating list carries 21 shop premises and 5 pubs, and no restaurant premises at all. Dinner out here means a pub, or it means driving.
Air quality across the East Devon council area averaged about 5.2 micrograms of fine particles per cubic metre in 2024. That is a council-wide figure rather than a reading taken outside the church.
About 36% of the area falls within the East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which is the paperwork catching up with what the drive in already made obvious.
The surrounding villages sound like a list somebody invented after a long lunch: Branscombe, Offwell, Widworthy, Wilmington, Whitford, Southleigh. Scattered among them are Blackbury Castle hillfort, Musbury Castle and the round barrow cemetery on Broad Down, so the high ground has been spoken for since long before anybody thought to name a postcode district after it. Conservation areas cover Colyton and Colyford, with more at Beer, Seaton, Musbury and Sidbury within reach.
Private outdoor space is the thing public green space figures never tell you about, and here it is the headline. Across the area's neighbourhoods there is roughly 420,000 square metres of private garden per 1,000 residents. Whatever this place asks you to compromise on, the bit out the back is not it.
The valuation list records 198 rateable premises in the area, including 6 offices and 54 holiday lets. Those are premises on a list rather than businesses trading today, and 54 holiday lets is a lot of kettles boiled by people who go home on the Saturday.
Of the 38 food premises carrying a hygiene rating, about 87% hold the top score and none sit in the bottom band. For a place with no restaurant premises on the books, the kitchens it does have are in good order.
Two absences are worth recording honestly. No site of special scientific interest overlaps the area, and no ancient woodland is mapped within it. Neither is a fault. It means the protection here comes from the wider designated landscape rather than from individual pockets of rare habitat, which is a different kind of green.
Strip everything else away and the setting is what remains standing: green in every direction, water in most of them, and a garden behind almost every door. Plenty of expensive places manage two of those three.