You can, and you will be doing it with a conservation officer reading over your shoulder. There are more than nine hundred listed buildings scattered across this area. Fourteen conservation areas. Twenty-two scheduled monuments. People extend houses here every year, and almost nobody does it on the timetable they first imagined.
Historic England lists 911 buildings across the area: 18 at grade I, 46 at grade II star and 847 at grade II. That is an unusual density of protection for a rural stretch of Devon, and it is worth understanding what it costs a buyer. Listing covers the whole building, inside as well as out, and frequently attached structures and curtilage buildings too. Replacing windows, opening up a chimney, taking out an internal partition, adding rooflights or bolting solar panels to a slate roof all become applications for listed building consent rather than weekend decisions. Doing the work without that consent is a criminal offence, not a fine, which is the detail people learn late.
Alongside the listings sit 14 conservation areas covering village cores such as Chittlehampton, High Bickington and Burrington along with several parts of Barnstaple. Conservation area designation does not freeze a house, but it trims what you can do without asking. Demolition of walls and outbuildings, work to trees, and a range of external alterations that would be permitted development elsewhere need consent inside the boundary. The line usually runs down a street rather than around a village, so two houses of identical age and appearance can sit under completely different rules, which is the sort of arrangement that makes perfect sense on a map and none at all over a garden fence.
There are also 22 scheduled monuments in the same boundary, taking in hillforts, bowl barrows, wayside crosses and castle remains. Scheduling is the strictest protection in the system and it applies to the ground rather than to buildings, so it matters mainly to anyone whose plans involve digging near one. For most house buyers it is background. For anyone eyeing a paddock, it is worth checking before the offer.
None of this stops people building. North Devon's planning register recorded 250 applications across the area between April 2024 and June 2026, with 114 of those in the last twelve months. Extensions, conversions and alterations are ordinary business here. The register is the proof that consent is obtainable, and the volume is a reminder that the planning department is not short of things to read.
Four of the listed buildings in the area appear on Historic England's Heritage at Risk register. That is a statement about condition rather than a warning to a neighbour. A building on the register is one whose fabric is deteriorating, which can open the door to grant support for repairs and will certainly attract close attention to any application. If you are buying one, you are buying a project with an audience.
The practical rule for anyone house-hunting here is to establish the designation before the offer rather than after the survey. If the house is listed, assume every visible change needs consent and budget for a heritage statement and an architect who has done it before. If it is in a conservation area, assume permitted development rights are narrower than the standard guidance suggests. If it is neither, and around six in ten dwellings on the valuation list were built after 1930, the normal rules apply and a rear extension is a normal project.
Freedom to alter your own home is the most constrained thing about this area. The heritage that makes the valley worth photographing is the same heritage that turns a new kitchen window into a six-month conversation, and there is no version of buying an old house here where that trade is not part of the price.