I moved from Edinburgh to right out in the sticks back in 1997, and never really looked back…

There are one or two drawbacks – living this far out you really need a vehicle (never used one in Edinburgh – mostly walked everywhere), as the public transport is lamentable (we get 2 busses a day that stop about 1/2 a mile from our house). There’s not a great deal of excitement or night life… Jobs can be tough to find, as there are far fewer (I’ve been self employed all my life though – could never get on with having a boss, so that has been less of a problem for me – worth making sure there are jobs in your field avaliable though)…

Thing is, if you want stuff like night life etc, then travel to a city (we regularly travel the 90 odd miles to Glasvegas to go out and whatnot – stay at friends houses, and have them come to stay with us in return, so the night life isn’t really missed)…

Living out in the middle of nowhere is great though – our nearest neighbour is a couple hundred meters up the farm track, so we can basically make all the noise we want with no problems… Every morning I can step out my door and see a different sunrise, every evening a different sunset (we have a view down over the Solway coast that is just breathtaking any time of day, but sunrise/set is particularly special)… My son goes to a school that has about 30 kids in the entire school – his class is made up of P1-3 kids, and consists of about 10 kids all told (which means he gets a good portion of the teachers time to himself)… I’m not particulary community minded (I prefer to be relatively private), but having such a small community means that people know this and are happy to let me be private (I still say hello and have a quick chat when I see people, but they don’t search me out unless they need to for some reason) – very different to the city, where you still got the gossip but without people actually getting to know you that well… If you like animals the countryside is obviously great (we have 2 dogs, and our pick of spectacular places to take them walking)…

I’m probably biased though, as before Edinburgh when I was growing up, I lived in the countryside – Edinburgh was my first city (and tbh my last – the convenience was cool, but at the cost of quality of life IMO – the dirt, bad air, noise and general hecticness were serious drawbacks for me)…