Living on Skye

It’s not at all difficult to see what makes visitors to Skye think that Skye is a wonderful place to live. 

Skye is stunningly beautiful. It is peaceful, magical, etherial. Nature is vibrant. There's more sheep than people. Strangers wave to each other. People have time to stop for a chat. The roads are virtually empty of traffic…. and yet the post arrives every day, there is high speed broadband, and the supermarket is stocked with just the same fruit and vegetables as you will find in Edinburgh, or even in the south of England.

There are building plots for sale with wonderful views….. “we could build the home of our dreams here”…. There are lovely houses for sale too… lots and lots of them… business premises too… 

errrr... What does that tell you.....?

BUT…..   

Living on Skye IS every bit as wonderful as people imagine  …….…..providing they are of the right mind to live here.

What do I mean by that?

Well, don’t tell the tourists… but… Skye is wet, cold and infested with midges. The wet and cold can be anytime, including mid-summer. Shorts and tee shirts are just never the right clothing for Skye. GOOD NEWS…the midges only swarm between May and September.

Joking aside - every member of the family who move to Skye with you MUST want to move here and live here just as much as you. Do they all like wet, cold and midges?

If you plan to move to Skye and in doing so, you will move away from close friends or family – you MUST be sure that both you and they are completely happy with that. On Skye, you will be as far from London than London is from Innsbruck in Austria or Milan in Italy.. It’s an awful long way to ‘pop back to see the kids’.

You will need LOTS of money. Living on Skye is much more expensive than you can imagine. It’s not just the inflated cost of petrol for the car, or the huge distances you have to drive to do the shopping - it’s the cost of heating your home (summer as well as winter, remember) and the cost of maintaining it too. ‘Weathering’ happens at least twice as fast here as in the south of England – so expect to be decorating outside every couple of years, and replacing the entire roof every 25.

You will need to be totally comfortable with the silence. Are you OK with not seeing another human being, outside of anyone who lives with you, for several days at a time? Are you SURE? It’s an expensive mistake to move here only to find that you are crying out for human company after six months…

Then there’s cinema, shows, soccer, shopping…

Can’t we do that on Skye…?