Salcombe: an estuary town where many of the houses are someone’s other home.

Salcombe sits in the South Hams, near the mouth of the Kingsbridge Estuary, and has no railway of its own. The road in is the A381 through Kingsbridge; Totnes, the usual station for the London trains, is forty minutes or so by car, and Plymouth about an hour. In season the centre has little room for a waiting car: from late March to October the Shadycombe car park is short stay only, three hours at most, and a seasonal park and ride brings visitors in. The other routes are by water — the year-round ferry across to East Portlemouth, which in summer leaves from the Ferry Steps, and the seasonal ferry from Whitestrand down to South Sands, where the South Sands Hotel sits on the beach.

By the neighbourhood-plan group’s own count, more than half the town’s homes were second homes, and the plan restricts new open-market houses to principal residences. Some villas are kept for their owners alone; others are let to holidaymakers. The town is reckoned to run from around 1,900 people in winter to nearly 25,000 at the height of summer — the season of the Salcombe Yacht Club Regatta each August and of dinners at the Harbour Hotel on Cliff Road. For an owner, that can mean a house standing empty all winter and, in summer, a holiday let next door with new faces each week.

A protective survey in Salcombe should judge the house as it stands shut up for winter, not only as it looks in August. Its graded written report takes in who holds keys and how changeovers between lets are run, alongside locks, glazing and the alarm. Away-day property watch is for the dates when an owner’s absence is public knowledge, not the whole winter. A security driver can meet the train at Totnes and bring the owners down the A381; close protection suits a visiting family through the August Regatta.