Older than the marketing, and a good deal less moneyed than the postcard. The median resident is closer to sixty than fifty. Roughly four in ten households are a single person. A quarter of homes are rented from a social landlord, which is not the number people expect from a town on Exmoor. This is somewhere people live all year, not a shelf of second homes with the lights off in February.
On tenure, about 56% of households own their home, roughly 18% rent privately and around 25% rent from a social landlord. That last figure is the one worth sitting with. For a small market town surrounded by moorland and holiday cottages, a quarter of the housing being social rented says the place has a working population living in it rather than a leisure economy wearing a town as a costume.
The age profile is unambiguous. The median age is 58, and only about 16% of residents are aged between 25 and 44. Every population figure on this page comes from the 2021 census. A town where the prime child-rearing decade is that thin is a town that has already made its choice about what it is, and the shops, the pace and the volume on a weekday morning all follow from it.
Household income runs to roughly £46,000 a year before tax, modelled for the financial year to March 2023 rather than for today. After tax, the equivalent figure is about £35,900. That is a comfortable-enough middle without being anywhere near the money that buys the detached houses at the top of this market, which is the quiet tension underneath everything else on this page.
Household make-up follows the age profile with depressing logic. About 40% of households are one person living alone, and roughly 24% are a pensioner living alone, that second figure being a subset of the first rather than an addition to it. Couples with dependent children account for about 10%, and lone parents about 7%. In practical terms, one in four front doors in this town opens onto a single older person, which is a fact with consequences for everything from bus timetables to how quickly anyone notices a burst pipe.
On qualifications, about 32% of residents hold a degree-level qualification and roughly 19% hold none at all. Full-time students round to nothing at about 0%, for the straightforward reason that there is nothing here to study at. The mix is broader than the housing stock suggests, with retired professionals and people who have worked the land and the trades occupying the same small high street.
Health self-reports are reasonable: about 76% of residents describe their health as good or very good, and roughly 8% as bad or very bad. Zooming out to the Somerset local authority, which covers far more than this valley, the smoking rate of about 11% is similar to England's, and the preventable mortality rate is better than England's. Those are county figures with a national benchmark attached, not measurements of this town, and neither of them is a statement about the people who live here.
Taken together, the demographic picture is one of the weaker parts of the case for Dulverton. An older population, modest incomes and a thin working-age middle add up to a town that is easy to retire into and harder to build a working life in. The scenery is doing better than the census.