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Talk to me - moving to Scotland from England

46 replies

pooopypants · 11/11/2020 16:33

So we currently live in Yorkshire but we're keen to move to Scotland. We aren't looking at big cities, definitely something more rural and out of the way. Has anyone done similar? How have you found it? What differences did you notice and were they difficult to get used to?

I think what I'm asking for really, are stories of people who have made the move and how they found it.

For background - we have a mortgage, DC4 and DC6, no indoor pets like cats / dogs, DH is WFH on a long term basis, I'm a SAHP but would be looking to return to work (C19 threw a spanner into the works on that) and have no family ties in Scotland that would mean moving to a particular part. We recently visited islands off the coast of Scotland and while we Loved it, I think that would be a step too far at this point, given that DC would need secondary school a few years down the line, so we're looking at the mainland vs island.

Any and all advice / hints / stories welcome!

OP posts:
Jellycatspyjamas · 11/11/2020 16:37

Scotland is a big place, are you thinking central best, the coast, more northern than that.

pooopypants · 11/11/2020 16:41

We're not particularly looking in one area more than another. That said, we've seen more of the east than the west, as that's the way we've travelled. No family in Scotland so we aren't drawn to one area over another.

One thing I wondered is heating - it might be minor, it might not be. We have GCH and from what I've seen, many systems seem to be AC (may not be actual AC but an air flow-type of heating) or oil. Is that because many homes aren't connected to a gas system?

I do appreciate that I'm being very broad asking about Scotland, I may as well be asking "where should I move to in England?" and it can be really vague and it's not a small country.

OP posts:
birchtree23 · 11/11/2020 16:43

I've live in Moray. Look it up. We look over the Moray Firth. Many people have moved up here due to the RAF and army and haven't left. Medical staff as well as Dr Gray's is our main hospital in this area.
Apparently we have a micro climate here too.
Get more for you money. We have a large house and very decent priced.
Not far from the Cairngorms if you are sporty, hill Walker, skier.

birchtree23 · 11/11/2020 16:45

www.must-see-scotland.com/scotlands-sunshine-coast

museumum · 11/11/2020 16:46

Like anywhere in the uk, gas mains depends on being in a town or city not rural. GCH is almost universal in the cities.

ShowOfHands · 11/11/2020 16:49

I'm following with interest. We plan to move to Scotland. DH is transferring his job (emergency services) and I work from home. DD will be 16 and DS will be 11 so one finishing secondary and one finishing primary before we move.

Ideally I'd like island or Highland living but we have dh's work and the dc to consider so are looking at West Coast.

Dinosauratemydaffodils · 11/11/2020 16:57

In my experience with heating, it really depends on how rural you are. Our village, everyone has oil tanks in their gardens because we're on/at the bottom of a cliff and installing gas would be a logistics nightmare. The two neighbouring villages have gas though. I'm in Aberdeenshire between Aberdeen and Dundee, love it here.

Jellycatspyjamas · 11/11/2020 17:06

If you’re moving to a city or suburb gas central heating will be pretty much standard. As a general rule the fourth east you go the colder it is, the west tends to be wetter. Outside the central belt public transport tends to be less well developed. What do you want from your move?

cantmovewont · 11/11/2020 17:06

I'm from and live in the Glasgow area and just spent a week up in the Moray area. Gorgeous!

SephrinaX · 11/11/2020 17:11

Another thing to consider - if both you and your husband end up working from home, and the type of work you do - is internet connectivity. Depending on how rural you go... broadband speed can be slow or non-existent.

IKEA888 · 11/11/2020 17:16

Dumfries and Galloway is lovely. It has the rural feel with the coast , forests and a large town.
cheap houses excellent schools and 1.5 hrs from Edinburgh or Glasgow.

IKEA888 · 11/11/2020 17:21

m.youtube.com/watch?v=sWLaQfH51IA

pooopypants · 11/11/2020 17:21

We've previously spent some time near Cairngorms and it's stunning. We're making steps to be more outdoorsy

Internet connection - DH would be able to sort something out even if local speed is on the lower end, that's his 'bag' so to speak. I wouldn't be aiming to work from home, his job is home based though. Obviously this is C19 dependant

What we want from the move - a cleaner, nicer place for our DC to grow up. Something away from the rat race that we have now.
Both DC adore nature and we're lucky if we get 5 different types of birds where we live, we're a few minutes from the city centre. While our house isn't IN the city centre, it's close.

Though the area we live in isn't too bad, crime is still an issue as we live in a large city. I appreciate that crime happens everywhere, the crime rates are lower (based on what I've read about a few areas).

200k where we live doesn't get you that far, based on the searches I've done, it gets you a damn sight more further north.

OP posts:
Hawkmoth · 11/11/2020 17:22

I'm in rural Aberdeenshire having moved from Manchester about a year ago.

I love it.

The schooling is so much more relaxed for the children.

Oil is fine, though we have run out twice as we're idiots.

Where we live is 20 min away from all the supermarkets and that's fine, stops you popping in every day and wasting money.

My Internet is excellent. It was a faff installing it as previous owners didn't have it, but it's faster and more reliable than we had in Manchester.

I can't tell you how much difference fresh air has made to me. I would have up to 15 migraines a month and now I have them very rarely, even though I'm working as much and still have a lot going on.

IKEA888 · 11/11/2020 17:26

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-86334001.html

sorry I'm passionate about my local area.. it really is amazing please come !

Saz12 · 11/11/2020 17:36

There are plenty of parts of Scotland where £200k won’t get you much. Is that your budget? If so you might find that’s the deciding factor in where you go! Lots of rural areas will have a “base line” house value based on what it would earn as a holiday cottage. It depends so much on how isolated you want to be! And don’t forget the “right to roam” legislation, and impacts of inappropriate tourist-boosting ideas (NC500 I’m looking at you...).

Borders is affordable, nice towns, a bit “bleak Heather moor” for my tastes though. Kintyre is nice, feels like an island, community feel to it, sea and beaches, wildlife, more affordable than islands.

Saz12 · 11/11/2020 17:39

Ooh, that’s a beautiful house! I’m rural Scotland but round our way that’d be on for o/o £650k!

Summerhillsquare · 11/11/2020 17:40

Things I noticed on the east coast: very centralised government, dark at 3pm by Christmas, lots of things close early/Sundays, clearer air outside cities, slower trains, shops and pubs quite old fashioned, bigger trees, cleaner beaches but limited facilities, it's own news/media cycle, more bookshops, tribal politics, football and religion, very white, rambling allowed anywhere more or less, obvious drug problems, desolate and bleak in many places both urban and wild.

Like anywhere, it depends what you like.

HerFlowersToLove · 11/11/2020 17:56

We'll be moving to Scotland in the coming months to be near family. I'd suggest spending time exploring areas and making notes as you go. We spent several weeks doing that to help us narrow things down

One thing we found is that so many homes are really near busy roads (eg the one linked to above which is by a motorway and a main road). That might not bother you at all, but it does us, and we've excluded loads of houses because of it

The weather varies hugely, and some parts of Western Scotland have more rain than anywhere else in the UK. The Met Office has climate details for all the weather stations. Some areas have treble the rain of where we currently live in England. The West is warmer and wetter, the East cooler and drier roughly speaking.

One other thing, we've been up looking recently and prices have exploded. There were houses going for 20% more than the home report. So prices on Rightmove bore no correlation to what you had to actually pay. We're going to see how prices settle before buying.

florascotia2 · 11/11/2020 18:18

OP I am very rural (and Scottish, married to another Scot). West coast. What follows is not negative. It's what we take for granted. BUT:

Re gas - no mains gas in most of rural Scotland. People have LPG ('Calor') with a big tank that is somewhere easy for the gas tanker to connect to. Often this has to be right in the middle of the front garden. In the garden, deer will eat your roses/veg, unless you put up high fences etc. This can feel a bit like living in a cage.

Most rural properties have no mains drainage. Septic tanks. You'll need to take out quite an expensive contract to have them maintained/unblocked/emptied.

Re food - no supermarket deliveries where I live, and in many other locations. Even in 'hub' towns, Inverness, Oban, Fort William etc, you have to remember that we are right at the end of a long delivery chain. Fruit and veg may have travelled for 48 hrs to get to the store. The supermarkets/wholesalers all do their very best, but we all find that fruit and veg, once purchased, does not have a long life. I have THREE freezers (in an outhouse) and use them all. This with bells on for the islands.

Unless you are in a town, you can't just 'pop to the shops'. Most village stores do a great job, but what they have will be very limited, compared to what's available in many urban centres in Scotland or elswhere. It will also be a lot more expensive. Not because the shopkeepers are profiteering, but because they have to pay more to get supplies. A great many other things - hardware, paint, building maintenance supplies etc - have to be ordered for delivery, or else you have to make a long journey to somwhere like Inverness to get them.

Petrol is also not always easily available - in rural areas, pumps can be few and far between. It is also more expensive than in cities and towns.

Re deliveries - even though the Highlands is on the UK mainland, Parcel Force and most delivery/courier companies pretend that we are offshore, and charge quite a lot more for deliveries. Having said that, local post men and women and local courier company drivers are fantastically helpful. But delivery times are longer, and less predictable.

Telecoms - many areas of the Highlands still don't have 'normal' broadband. Some have slow ADSL; some have very expensive and download-limited satellite (that is affected by the weather). The same applies to TV and radio. Where we live, you can't get BBC Radio for much of the time. For TV, most people have satellite.

Schools - very rural children (even tinies) are routinely bussed quite long distances, for up to an hour each way. Where I live, secondary school pupils have to be weekly or part-weekly boarders. As a result, social life can be difficult for children. As they get older, you will probably spend hours and hours and hours ferrying them around in the car. The roads are not really safe for cycling. Most remote villages - if they are lucky - have one bus per day.

Roads. Single track, mountainous, often ungritted. Slow and (to repeat myself) not safe - corners, cliffs, ditches, odd cambers. Clogged by tourists - camper vans! - in the summer. Blocked by fallen trees etc in stormy weather.

Hospital/GP/Dentist/Ambulance/ Care Homes etc. If you will need these, check out where the local facilities are. Until recently, our GP was an hour away each way and the hospital/dentist 2.5 hours away. It took an ambulance at least an hour to reach people. The only first aid was from volunteers, who were not licensed to prescribe several life-saving medicines.

In the west, it rains an awful lot. Even more than west of the Pennines. The further north you get, the darker it is, evenings and mornings in the winter. The sun set here at just past 4pm today and it was dark, and pouring with rain, and very windy.

I have found neighbours in the places we have lived quite wonderfully kind and helpful. Community feeling really does exist, in my experience, but that does mean that you, too, are expected to play a part - I'm not for a moment suggesting that you wouldn't - and that people will feel that they have a right to know your business and comment on it. The same is true for small communities worldwide, I expect. It's not particularly Scottish. But - as if you were moving into any small community, anywhere - I'd suggest listening carefully and learning before voicing too many opinions.

At the same time, communities are increasingly divided, between local people whose families have lived in the area for generations, and increasing numbers of newcomers (who mostly move from areas where housing is more expensive, and can afford the nicer houses). There is a really serious shortage of affordable housing in many areas. There is also a serious shortage of work for young people to do. In theory, more and more people should be able to work from home. But only where there are decent telecoms...

Crofting is a remarkable institution and has helped generations of Highlanders and their families to survive. (I'm not knocking it; my ancestors were crofters.) But it does involve real differences in land tenure and land use; these can be surprising if you are not used to them. Any Scottish solicitor will explain, however. Local crofters also sometimes tend to form a community within a community - for entirely practical and understandable reasons.

Having said all that - remote parts of Scotland are a fantastic place to live. The scenery. The beaches. The fresh air. The space. The wildlife. The opportunities for outdoor activities. And, in our case, the lovely neighbours.

florascotia2 · 11/11/2020 18:30

OP re broadband. I'm not sure what magic your husband can work - and really good luck to him (I'm not being sarcastic) - but the issue in a great many places is simple distance from the BT/Openreach exchange. The signal is not strong enough to travel to houses. (Yes, boosters have been tried.) Also, in rocky areas, many BT cables are simply on the surface, by the side of the road, or else in open ditches full of water. This makes them vulnerable. I've lived in a house where you couldn't use the phone after heavy rain.
In some areas, there are satellite systems (not BT). But these are slow - latency - and expensive. There are also various community initiatives based on WiFi and little local aerials fixed to peoples' house. But they depend on deals done with bigger suppliers (it's taken several years for BT to collaborate in one place I know of) and are also very weather dependent. The winds here have been 50 mph plus today.

ArranBound · 11/11/2020 18:35

I moved to a rural part of the central belt from Yorkshire 5 years ago and, even here, we only get 1mbps broadband. It's painful.

Don't get me wrong, the scenery up here in Scotland is stunning, but the atmosphere in the whole nation is very divided. It's making me hate living here and sometimes I daren't open my mouth to reveal an English accent.

CormoranStrikesANoteofDoom · 11/11/2020 18:44

I’d be after one of the accessible islands on the west coast - Bute for example.

Half an hour in the ferry, another forty minutes direct train to the city centre, and a hell of a lot of house for your money

www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/56332629

Island has schools, secondary school, a college - maybe too sleepy for a young family but I would love it.

CormoranStrikesANoteofDoom · 11/11/2020 18:49

Or this one, where I have stayed a few times as an Airbnb

www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/86619181

ShowOfHands · 11/11/2020 18:56

Ohhhh even the negative stuff is selling it to me. Don't know about you op.

I'm pretty rural now but my first house was in the middle of nowhere, had a septic tank, no mains water (we had a bore hole), no Internet, no TV and electricity wasn't a given. No home deliveries as almost nobody could find us. I've run a sustainable living project and am a qualified horticulturalist and we are working towards sustainability as far as possible. I even love rain.

I'm genuinely considering doing it sooner rather than later.

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