How remote do you live?

[mytreehouse]

For me I love the sea and have countryside but they are places I crave when I’ve got downtime.

I live a 10 minute drive from a major city, I walk 5 minutes and I’ve got a coffee, I love buying fresh food from the local greengrocers, having people around. Working in a fancy office building and getting lunch at a million different restaurants.

I really do love city life as my every day life - but I also know this is hell for some people.

Very remote. 9 miles to the nearest village. 32 miles to the nearest town, supermarket etc. 133 miles (7 hour round trip) to the nearest city. No takeaway or supermarket deliveries but we do get Amazon.

London is split into 6 main ‘Zones’ by Transport for London for fare pricing, with Zone 1 being the most central and Zone 6 the outside ring. Londoners / those who visit London tend to use these to gauge and convey distance from the centre of London.

Semi rural here, I’m on the very outskirts of a medium sized town, can see huge hills from my house, I’m a five minute walk away from fields in two different directions which was a godsend in lockdown and a five minutes drive from forests surrounding our local area. My kids school is also on the edge of the town but is surrounded by countryside, lots of cows, horses and sheep in adjoining fields and a view over the moors and it feels very rural! I think we have the best of both worlds; lots of shops, cafes, good schools and GP nearby and stunning countryside around us 😊

I now live in the Glasgow suburbs but used to live (and will again once dc are all settled elsewhere) in the rural outer Hebrides. 15 mins from a village of 500 people, 35 mins from a town of 8000 with 2 supermarkets. 5 buses a day each way (I can't drive for medical reasons). 15 miles to small primary school and nursery. 20 mins drive to GP but always can be seen same day if required. Since we left you can now get Tesco deliveries 2 days a week!!

If you left the house at 5am you could get the ferry that then gets you to Glasgow by 3:30pm with a long enough stop in Inverness to get petrol and a meal deal at Tesco.

Despite all this we love it and have kept our house there, planning to move back when our dc all have had our help to get a flat/house and settled in their careers. Currently we spend about 6 weeks a year there (dh is self employed so can choose his holidays). Rent the house to tourists but block off the weeks we want. Going in 2 weeks and can't wait!!

Nearest neighbours are only 100m but we are surrounded by fields, hills & woods. Nearest coffee & pint of milk 10mins drive (got to love the farm shop trend!!), nearest market town 20mins drive and nearest (small!) city 25 mins drive. Previously lived in London for 15 years, been here 10 - could never go back to being surrounded by so many people….love the tranquility of where we live☺️

Remote from what?

Rural, very quiet but not remote as only 15 minutes away from a small market town and 30 minutes from a large town with hospital/shops/retail parks etc. Wasn't always easy with teenagers as we had to drive them everywhere but wouldn't change it for the world. Nearly every field locally has a public footpath through it, and we can walk miles in all directions.

Is it possible to be rural not remote? We live in a small village equidistant between a well known city and town in the SE. It's all fields round here and I can't walk to a shop.

I was going to say semi rurally but after reading what others have described as semi rural, I would be considered as rural.

It’s a 45 min drive on a good day to the nearest city but easily over an hour if a tractor, loose farm animals or accident blocks the (one track) roads leading there. School is another 15 mins away and whilst we do have a shop, it doesn’t sell anything more useful to us than milk. We get floods quite a lot here as well.

Nearest train station is 20 mins away and then it’s less than an hour to London and everything we could need.

30 mins to central London

No neighbours for roughly 1 mile in every single direction. ( backed on to a National park ) , 3 miles from a small village , 6 miles from a bigger one and 10 miles from a beautiful small city.

I've lived in cities but my heart is in Cornwall. I once had an interview for a job in London (which I did get) and they asked "we see you live in Cornwall... Will you cope living in London??" Cities were fun when I was younger but I'm happy raising my family. In the countryside. Live in a village and wish I was REALLY rural!

This sounds perfect!

Zones don't mean anything to those not living near London, hence my comment.

Reading your post, and I was sat here smiling because you can almost feel your excitement! I bet you can't bloody wait, it sounds gorgeous.

DH and I feel the same about his home village in Norway (think Øvre Årdal, but...not, haha!). We've got a few years left here in the UK to get where we want in our careers, and then we can go permanently. At the moment, we visit every winter and during the summer holidays, but every time it just gets harder to leave. I also need to really work on my language skills before we can go. I've been lazy and can barely speak a jot. Kids on the other hand can speak to their dad fluently.

I hope you have the best time when you visit!

We’re very remote. I can see our nearest neighbours lights on across the loch in winter. I’m a 20 minute drive to the nearest tiny shop in summer, in winter if it snows it can take me up to an hour and a half to get there. Our nearest supermarket is over an hour away and decent shopping 3 hours. When the Beast from the East hit us we never saw anyone for 11 days. Our freezers and pantry are always stocked from mid September to the end of April. We absolutely adore where we live except when the camper vans or “wild campers” block our drive in summer!

I did it the other way round! Left London for a few years while kid is small for a tiny Central Scotland village to be near my sister and her kiddos and avoid London nursery fees...wonder if I can guess which place you lived as sounds a very familiar situation to where I live atm😅

Edge of a small town.

Within minutes walk I'm in the countryside. 20 mins drive to nearest nice beach.

But can also walk into the town or jump on a train to a nearby city.

Small coastal town which is very urban in some ways, and incredibly rural in others.

We have schools from nursery through to sixth form, an excellently equipped GP surgery and hospice, lots of independent shops, two dental surgeries, a fire station, a library and quite a few great little cafes. There's a great little sense of community and we're right by the sea. It's gorgeous.

But the flip-side is that we're 40 minutes away from any kind of hospital. We have no access to anything like Uber, JustEat or Deliveroo. There are no chain restaurants, no fast food places, no chain coffee shops. We don't have access to a swimming pool or any kind of cinema/indoor entertainment, there's no soft play for kids, very few baby/toddler classes (I think one a week) etc.

We do have a train station but the trains are incredibly unreliable and are often delayed or cancelled for days at a time. You would struggle to live here without access to a car. But even then, we were cut off for three days last December due to heavy snow. The roads were totally impassable, even for tractors. It meant we had no food deliveries, no access for the emergency services etc.

I absolutely love it but many people find it very cut off and isolated, despite having access to most of the basics. I'm not sure I'd want to raise children here as to access any kind of activity means a long drive!

I live rurally, 15 mins drive from nearest town / shops, 15 mins drive from school.
No bus service until get into town and then limited
Half an hr from a train station
An hour from a major city,

Most of the time I love it, it's very safe, we have a huge garden that the kids make good use of, small community where we actually speak to our neighbours.
Occasionally it gets on my wick how far we are from basic amenities and it's frustrating that we can't get takeaway deliveries, taxis etc easily.

I work close to said major city though and would take where I live vs what I could afford close to work any day.

Completely agree about London. I could have written your post.

I am a city girl. This struck a chord with me "I learned that I really like the happy activity buzz of other humans as they live their own lives;"

I enjoy the bustle and variety of people around me in public and but I don't want to talk to them 😁Most of all, I like the diversity of a city. I find that rural places in the UK can be quite monocultural.

I live in a SSSI and an AOOB. (For those uninitiated because this stuff is imported to us - it means a sight of significant scientific interest and an area of outstanding beauty..)

I am 7 minutes drive from general
Shop, 10 mins drive from supermarket.. and 1hr 10 from London (although would have to be dragged there kicking and screaming) .. on a 'b' road for 3 miles and 7 miles of unregistered single track ..:

5 miles drive to the nearest supermarket or coffee shop, unless you count the greasy spoon on a little industrial estate nearby.

7 miles from the nearest town centre.75 mins from London by train.

I see roe deer and muntjac most days, foxes, skylarks, buzzards, kites. 🙂

Semi-rural. Plenty of single track lanes and hamlets/ small villages, footpaths through woods, meadows etc, but also 10/15 mins drive from 2 major commuter towns and only 25 mins on train to capital city. Looooooove it.

By train 2 or more hours from Plymouth or Exeter. Five from
London. Tortuous!

But on a daily basis I don't feel remote because I can walk to my nearest village and get a cuppa or have a swim or a meal out.

But yes I must admit I'm starting to grow weary of our big picture remoteness. Both children now live in London and sometimes I hanker to return....