Yes, and the neighbours are ahead of you. The village holds three dozen listed buildings and a conservation area sitting over its historic core. Hundreds of planning applications have gone in across the local area in the past two years. Most postcodes here sit within reach of old mine workings. What constrains you in Combe Martin is not planning appetite, it is which side of the conservation boundary your roof happens to fall on.
There are 36 listed buildings here: 1 at grade one, 2 at grade two star, and 33 at grade two. For a village of this size that is a dense heritage register, and listing is not decorative. It covers the whole building, inside and out, so replacing windows, altering a roofline, changing render or moving an internal wall becomes an application for listed building consent rather than a decision you make with a builder over tea. Owners of the grade one and grade two star buildings already know this. The people who get caught out are the grade two owners who assumed the protection was cosmetic.
One conservation area covers the village. Inside it, the ordinary permitted development freedoms are tighter than they are elsewhere, and changes to the external appearance of a house draw more scrutiny from North Devon Council than the same work would 200 metres up the hill. The conservation boundary tends to follow the old core, which is the part with the character, which is the part you were looking at.
Volume says this is not a place where alteration is futile. Across the local planning area, 470 applications were submitted between April 2024 and July 2026, with 181 of those in the most recent twelve months. That is a steady flow of people converting, extending and altering. Whatever the constraints are, they are not stopping anyone from trying.
The ground is the complication buyers do not expect. The geological screening shows about 81% of postcodes here sit within range of recorded historic mine workings, with up to 3 workings within 500 metres of a single postcode, and 30 postcodes sitting directly over a recorded working. None of that predicts a problem with any particular house, and none of it is coal, so the coalfield reporting regime does not apply. What it means practically is that a mining search is a sensible instruction rather than an optional extra, that a specialist report is sometimes wanted on top, and that a lender or an insurer can ask for one before they commit. Find that out during conveyancing, not during the structural engineer's second visit.
The practical shape of it: if the house is unlisted and outside the conservation area, ordinary permitted development rights apply and modest work goes ahead as it would anywhere. If it is listed, consent is required for a great deal more than you would assume, including changes nobody can see from the street. If it is inside the conservation area but unlisted, you sit in between, with tighter limits on external alterations and a council that will want to talk about materials. Establish which of those three you are buying before you make an offer, because it changes the cost of every plan you have for the place.
Freedom to alter a house here is middling. The heritage register and the conservation boundary are real constraints on the old core, but they cover a slice of the village rather than the whole of it, and the volume of applications going in says most owners find a way through.