AIBU to move from city to rural Scotland (Perthshire/Fife)?

[justlookatthatbooty]

I live in a very busy little european city and want to move to rural scotland for the nature and for the forest/outdoor nursery in Perthshire/Fife. DC's are half european and half english and are bilingual. I look at their indoorsy little selves and see that they are only half of themselves somehow.... and yearn for a bracing outdoorsy life for them, at least for a couple of years. Not to mention abit of UK'ness and English language immersion. We already have arctic winters where we live so no change there. But AIBU to steer the whole family (DH willing and open but it's essentially my move) abroad?

Also what you need to consider is your children's education. If you only plan to stay here for a couple of years, moving schools might be tricky. This is what DH and I are thinking. We want to move to Germany, where I am from. School in Scotland starts at 4 years usually, in Germany at 6 or even 7, depending on birthdates. So we decided that a move really has to happen before our still unborn baby would start school in Scotland as otherwise they'd have to go back to kindergarten in Germany when they can already read and write.

How does the school system in Holland work? I seem to remember that it's closer to the German system than the Scottish one. These are all things to consider if you decide to move for just a couple of years.

I notice that I have been very negative so far. There are also positive aspects about living here, mostly how warm and open the Scottish are compared to your crumpy standard German.

It's all very well to say you can cope with some anti-English feeling but if DCs run into others at school who think it's clever to torment them because they are and sound English you could be making their lives a misery.

thanks Highlander for your realism take on the have/have not divide.

You've assumed that I have utopian views and you're wrong in your assumptions thankfully. I live in a city and I'm looking for nature. Doesn't mean I have picturepostcard ideas and by the way, I can't stand Boden. So despite the irritating assumptions, thanks for your helpful points.

Mrs Hux I'm LOL re crumpy... sounds like the Nederlanders! School starts at 4 here but it's kindergarten for a couple of years. Was planning to have my kids at scottish version of waldkindergarten til they're five or six. Then switch to either UK school such as New Forest Small school or something similar or return to NL (godforbid) for the excellent Guus Kieft school (which if it weren't for a dire need for cultural change for keep us here).

Thanks all.

They could be bullied about anything,Andrew,and anti-English comments certainly aren't guaranteed. My upper class English dp,so more of a target one would think, has been here for a number of years and has encountered almost no anti English idiots,or if he has they've certainly not made their views obvious.
An English friend that I went to school with has had the same experience.

i have lived in scotland for 17 years and can count anti- english things on fingers of one hand it does not matter unless you really care about football
i certainly do not think your dutch husband will have a problem

weather east coast of scotland drier but generally colder and more snow west coast wetter and windier does snow sometimes but rarely last as long ( last winter being an exception) west coast has midges from june to august best weather is generally april and may and september october

AS my kids are 2 and 3 and we are only looking to stay a couple of years I'm not too concerned about 'making their lives a misery'. Thanks.

ooh that's great geography/weather info Sarah. Ta!

Perth is lovely btw.

Is there a Scottish version of a Waldkindergarten??? I want to send my kids there. Do you mean Waldorf as in Steiner?

google mindstretchers? No not waldorf.... more of the forest school thing.

Ahh, that looks so nice. Shame it's too far away from where I am.

I don't know the Perthshire area at all well, but we are up the road in Angus

Certainly there is lots going on in the smaller towns, Montrose/Arbroath/Carnoustie, all have good selection of primary schools, after school clubs, weekend activities.

Plenty of wide open spaces too, we are five minutes from town with less than a dozen neighbours, a car would be an essential though, certainly I would not manage without mine.

As far as "the light" goes, it's not properly light till gone 9am some days and dark again by 4.30 that can get you down, but as already said, you need to make the best of any good weather you get....also we are on top of the sea and I know that helps me and gives a real sense of space and openness which I know I would miss if I was landlocked.

IME the anti english feeling is not that prevalent, people will pick up on a non local accent, never mind an english one, but other than general joshing neither of us have experienced any bad feeling. I am scottish but have no discernable accent so often get asked "so where are YOU from". Dh is from the West Country.

come to Harrogate (North Yorkshire) - it's fantastic. I used to live on Skye and prefer it here in all honesty. Best of all worlds round here - easy access to rural and urban and very friendly.

East coast definitely colder and (slightly) drier than West, but suffers from biting Easterly winds at times and the dreaded haar in the summer which has ruined many a day out to the beach when everyone else basks in sunshine
Fishing villages like Crail, Elie, Anstruther are lovely and the Fife Coastal walk is wonderful.
If you are looking at a small town rather than very rural, I would choose St Andrews in Fife over Glenrothes, Kirkcaldy and Dunfermline any day. But I would still choose Perthshire over Fife. On the Perth/Fife boundary (almost) is Kinross which is a pleasant little place. My DDs went to High School there and it draws children from some very rural place all around - places with wonderful names like Drum, Rumbling Bridge, Crook of Devon and Yetts o' Muckart. Rural, but on the M90 motorway for quick links to Perth in the north and Edinburgh in the south.

I heard a rumour that Muckart primary was thinking of becoming a forest school.
Actually in places like Creiff and Comrie and Dunblane you tend to find quite a lot of English people (and in Dollar where I live) as they gravitate towards nice small towns with private schools nearby when they move here with jobs! There can be a social divide that kicks in further up the school system. (Not so much in Dunblane though).

Actually, in Dollar we have a member of staff in the nursery who has Dutch parents and who speaks Dutch!

I would go for a small town rather than a small village if I were in your shoes.

thanks for the posts.... all very helpful.

Is Crieff a small town and is Comrie a small village?

yes, well Comrie is more of a medium sized village, it has shops and other facilities.

I'm about 80 miles north of Perth, the summers are no different from the rest of Scotland. The Winters are a different story. Housebound for weeks due to snow although it is a ski resort so everyone else loves it. When i moved here it was a small village, its ever expanding now. We have stunning views of the Cairngorms, its beautiful but unless you want to hillclimb,mountain bike, ski or snowboard then you'd be bored stupid.

Good Luck! I mentioned to DH about moving to Perthshire, it is lovely.

YANBU, sounds like it could be a good move :)

I haven't read the thread but I'd advise avoiding Kirkcaldy - I spent my teenage years trying to escape and now I will never go back. Too many insular attitudes. Perthshire is nice.

I'm from Crieff (don't live there now) and I would love to be back there...to bring up my children.

There will always be a division between "locals" and incomers but its not direct or antagonistic.

One thing that does strike me as a Mum now is that I do an awful lot of after school activities, and when questioned by my Mum as to why we do quite so many, my answer is always that I want my children to do the activities that I couldn;t when I was growing up in Crieff. We are in Aberdeen now and its very important to me that my girls do lots of things that I couldn't (swimming lessons, brownies, rainbows, dancing etc etc - I'm sure these things are available now in Crieff as its got a lot bigger since I left 10 years ago ish).

I was back in Crieff a few weeks ago and yep, I'd move back to bring my kids up.

I live in the area you're talking about, right in the middle of the countryside too, OP. I'm not Scottish or from the UK either although DH is Scottish. It is made up mainly of close-knit, small-town communities, obviously, who would even consider someone from Edinburgh to be a different species of human altogether but there are plenty of newcomers living here as well. We are new to the area, having moved out of Edinburgh, and find people to be friendly day-to-day but it takes work, like anywhere, to build a network and settle in.

I wouldn't think for 5 mins about your DH being 'treated badly' for being Dutch ?!? - this isn't Outer Mongolia. Plenty of people are from elsewhere or have lived abroad before coming back to Scotland. I do get the occasional comment about my home country ('so what're ye doin' here then?' was the latest...) but nothing worse than I've had elsewhere in the UK or Germany, where I used to live.

It's like moving anywhere: if you come here with an open mind, willing to handle the small-town life stuff as a price to pay for a rural environment and more relaxed life for your kids then you'll be fine. I'm from a rural / small town area in my own country so for me it's familiar and not a culture shock. If you or your DH are real big city types you might struggle.

Jesus, just read some of the other posts - nice patronising attitude from some of the posters here... did any of you ever think that some of the anti-English feeling might come from locals being fed up of being patronised by you?

What's so bad about someone flying a flag of their own country in their own backyard??? With a narrow-minded, defensive attitude like that MrsSnow it's no wonder people aren't very friendly to you. I'm sure they can feel the condescension coming off you in spades...People have every right to be proud of their country in their own country.

A time to complain about flags would be more like the time I was on South Uist / Benbecula, a Gaelic-speaking area, and driving past some RAF houses, we saw English flags flying, a real triumphalist insult to the locals and rejection of their Gaelic-speaking culture. That's the kind of racist flag-waving that would worry me.