Places to live in Central Scotland?

>Night night. Enjoy pumping your sister. <

Night Boab.

Clearly I have more accumulated knowledge on the towns of Central Scotland on my wee pinkie than you do on either of your two arses…

That's my other hoose. 🙂

Dunkeld anyone?

Lithgae's sh1te man – full of knuckle trailing rejects fae Glesga and Embra

>There are very few places outside East of Scotland which I'd choose to live in, having visited many through work<

Kit – did your mammy knit you?

Not like Linlithgow HB? I thought it was a nice place and just my small mindedness stopped me liking it.

Clearly I have more accumulated knowledge on the towns of Central Scotland on my wee pinkie than you do on either of your two arses…

Dry your eyes, you absolute veiny throbber of a boy

I've some sympathy with you here BB. I made a glib comment about Dundee being an armpit of a place recently and got total pelters. Looks like it's your turn tonight

Nice well balanced argument bob ,you have still not told me where you have stayed.

Just how did this descend into internecine squabbling?

What kind of impression do you the ink the OP will form of us Scots when he reads this tawdry litany of parochial ****?

Let's all just grow up FFS.

Go on then , i'll recommend Cumbernauld !!

>Just how did this descend into internecine squabbling?<

"Glesga is better than Embra"
"Naw Embra is better than Glesga"
"Och, alright then, have it your way.. At least we're agreed – everwhere else is sh1te"

Something like that iirc..

Heres an outside bet – its all p1sh. There you go.

>Heres an outside bet – its all p1sh. There you go.<

Not at all – doing part well on access legislation (e.g compared to NZ 😉

It's really worth looking around – we live in Milton of Campsie, which is really nice and not overly expensive, but I'd not so keen on the villages at either side of us; Kilsyth or Lennoxtown. Kirkintilloch is not bad either.

*whispers* yeah I know , i own a house in Fife but anyway, its a horrible place, full of nutters and weirdos.

stuartie_c – Member

Just how did this descend into internecine squabbling?

What kind of impression do you the ink the OP will form of us Scots when he reads this tawdry litany of parochial ****?

Let's all just grow up FFS.

too true

To summarise the above it really depends on what facilities you want on your doorstep and the amount of money you are willing to spend to rent/buy. Factors such as ease of access to trunk roads and larger town/cities is also a considerations.

Oh and remember no matter where you end up it is either a sh!tehole full of robbing tubes and bawheids or a lovely friendly and supportive community, depending on where the person you are talking to is from.
Usually the closer/inbred the more vitriolic the scorn.

Blindmelon, based on some of the posts on here I would recommend not moving to Scotland 😯

Anyway it depends where your main work place is going to be. Kilmarnock to Dundee is quite a spread. Also what are your main criteria for a house/place to stay eg. big house, garden, garage, flat, bars, restuarants, nightlife, trails on your doorstep etc.. Glasgow and Edinburgh are the obvious choices if you want city living.

But parking, prices, traffic, usual city stuff. Also getting in & out of Glasgow/Edinburgh in rush hour is a bit of a pain.

There are plenty of OK towns, Stirling, Cumbernauld,Falkirk Uddingston, Livingston, Linlithgow etc that all have good & bad bits. For riding on your doorstep, I think Stirling is quite hard to beat. But there's a lot of nice wee villages if tranquility & riding is your main thing.

Having lived in Glasgow, Edinbrugh and Stirling (as well as a few places outside of each):

If you want to have a party lifestyle then Glasgow. It was great in my early 20's but I couldn't do it again. Has everything you want from a city along with all the disadvantages. It's a damn friendly place for a city though, feels more like a (very) large town in many ways – still love the place, but only to visit now!

Edinburgh was okay, but very affluenet and I didn't really fit into the right socio-economic grouping to make the best of it 😉 There are some good pubs, and if it's culture you want it's the best bet. The Pentlands on the doorstep are a nice advantage with some reasonable riding and Glentress is but a stones throw away. It's noticeably less friendly a place than Glasgow I found, though perhaps not to the extent that most Glasweigans would have you believe.

Stirling is a lovely place to live so long as you want mainly the outdoor lifestyle. Fantastic access to the Highlands and the riding on the doorstep is pretty damn good. The bike club is also superb (and one of the things I really miss having moved away). It is, however, a small place – so you will lose out on a lot of the big city benefits that you have in the other two… that said there are plenty of good places to eat and a handful of decent pubs… the local brewery is fantastic too 😉 If I had to move back to one of them that would be my first choice. The outlying villages *can* be pretty good too, depending on which ones you go to! Callander is great, but a nightmare with tourists and daytrippers in the summer. Dunblane is probably my pick of them as it has a magnificent pub with good selection of proper beed 😉 The Hillfoots seem to be going through the early stages of a rejunination with a lot of folk moving out of Stirling to them for the cheaper housing so they are perhaps less populated by the dreaded Ned than they once were.

My wildcard: Perth. I think it's an ace town – bit of a hike down to Edinburgh and Glasgow but not bad for Dundee. Plenty going on there and it gives very good access into the Highlands. If I had stayed up there that would have been on my list of next places to go to (along with Inverness)… but I wound up in the Lake District instead… hey ho!

what rob said.

either edinburgh or glasgow are good esp if you're younger and keener on going out. but both are pants if you want be cycling from your doorstep.

perth is great, better for me than stirling as it's not so full of folk. and the cycling, inc the darkside, is fantastic, both in terms of what's easily accessible and what you can get to on your doorstep. (edinburgh and glasgow are about an hour away by car, tho that varies wildly for glasgow)

I've been dragged up in Stirling/Falkirk area so have a reasonably jaded insight into both areas – I prefer Stirling (live in one of the villages along the Hillfoots), but have stayed in a few places and spent many an hour in all the areas around the metroplois of the main town (both Stirling and Falkirk). I also spent a wee while in Kincardine – now that was a rather insular place…I used to ride my bike a lot and the locals would cross the road to avoid saying hello to me as I didn't spend every evening in the pub getting wasted…

Falkirk area is fine to live in and like anywhere there are good parts and bad parts – to be honest, most places are what you make of them, so if you think it's a dump it generally will be – that's not to say trouble won't find you but in most cases you have to look very hard. Saying that, I'd tend to avoid looking at Bainsford, Langlees, Westquarter, Hallglen, Slamannan and Carronshore (but these are almost entirely down to growning up round them as a kid and not based on any real evidence).

I love Stirling, it's busy enough for me, seems to have everything I'm after but it's out in the country so I don't need to see constant concrete…for outdoors stuff it's excellent as the Ochils are right there (probably a very similar statement from the Auld Reekie's about the the Pentlands)…the people seem friendly enough (but I'm not exactly a social animal so not the best to comment).

If Stirling was an area you'd consider, then to get a 'decent' price for renting, I'd avoid the main town (or city as it's now classed!), Dunblane (nice but a bit posh and up it's self – not everyone in Dunblane is like that, but the ones you see/hear most are) – Bridge of Allan suffers from this as well. Causewayhead is probably a good area to look for rentals as well as Bannockburn. The Hillfoots villages have some cracking places to rent, amazingly convenient for the hills (Alva has a cracking new bike shop Flying Fox Bikes) but have the disadvantage of a potential long 'divert' around the hills if you have to go North and the weather isn't great – depends which end of the hills you stay, it's not a problem but if you do want to go north from Alva/Menstrie/Blairlogie then the 'quickest' option is A9 at Bridge of Allan – at rush hour it's a bit of a drag.

I guess you need to see where your work takes you to help decide which area would be best – as much as you want a great place for your leisure time, if it adds a half drive either end of your day each day, just to get to and back from work it might not be ideal.

Overall, there are very few bad places these days, but if you go looking for trouble, it'll find you.

Glasgow and Edinburgh are both easy to get to from the Central Belt corridor by car or train, so if that is what you are after then you can escape the built-up bustle of a large city and stay somewhere quieter and enjoy a bit more peace and quiet.

+1 Perth just a nice city

Actually somebody said Bo'ness – a friend of mine lives there and it's a bit of a well kept secret, esp given the locale.

Another friend of mine stays in Lenzie, just north of Glasgow, there seem to be some nice bits up there, even some hills to ride up and good access to M8/M74 if you need to get anywhere although I think it might be pricey. But lets face it you get what you pay for in life, I think it's worth spending money to live somewhere nice where you don't have to worry about getting broken into, call me middle class.

you're middle class.

swiss01 – Member

what rob said.

either edinburgh or glasgow are good esp if you're younger and keener on going out. but both are pants if you want be cycling from your doorstep.

Edinburgh has plenty of MTBing that you can cycle to. Not fantastic but it is there – from corstorphine hill with its techy bits and pump and jump tracks to the pentlands and out into the lothians either direction.

I live right on the shore in leith – probably the least accessible part of the city and I can get into the pentlands in under an hours riding.

However – having thought about this a bit unless the OP wants a city and its facilities then Stirling might well be the best bet.

which is as maybe tj but that's still a two hour round trip and look what you have to cycle thru! and corstorphine hill? that's just depressing.

to be fair tho, you have to make the best of what you've got (which i did from portobello for years)and edinburgh has some nice nooks and byways. i think i'm probably spoiled these days seeing as my nearest trail is oh, all of thirty seconds away!

Actually somebody said Bo'ness – a friend of mine lives there and it's a bit of a well kept secret, esp given the locale.

There are a couple of nice bits on the outskirts of Bo'ness e.g. on the east side near the A993 but overall it's not somewhere I'd choose, even if it's not the total dump that it used to be. And this is from someone who himself comes from a Central Scotland dump (Bonnybridge).

I went to uni in Stirling and lived for about 10 years in Linlithgow and I'd move back to either with no worries. I'd also be happy enough in Falkirk but I'd want to be living around the high station area probably. I'm in Balerno (edge of Edinburgh and the Pentlands) and prefer it to any of those, although it's more expensive (although perhaps not by much in the case of Linlithgow).

which is as maybe tj but that's still a two hour round trip

Not if you chose to live closer to the hills in areas like Colinton, Fairmilehead, Currie or Balerno (all of which are good areas). From where I live to the Pentlands trailheads is just over a mile and can mostly be done on singletrack if preferred.

Swiss – what I have to cycle thru? A choice of two offroad routes all the way there! My point is I live in the worst bit for access to the hills and its still only an hour at TJ pace. Corstorphine hill is good – even if its only an hour or sos entertainment.

I guess I know more bits around the city than you found – I'm still finding bits and I have been here 18 yrs

Thanks for all the advice, you haven't managed to put me off just yet! I don't want to be in a city, prefer a quiet town or small village. Think I will start the search around Stirling area. What are the Hillfoot vilages that a few people have mentioned called?

I work at Grangemouth and my fiance works in Alloa. We were renting in Larbert for 6 months and we actually just bought a flat there. There's not that much to do really at the minute (only a couple of places to drink but does have great chinese and indian restaurant/takeaway) but there is a masterplan for the overall area which will see it develop more over coming years, hence why we bought there as an attempt to make a couple of quid too when we sell.

Good access to A876/M9/M8, 15 mins to carron valley and plenty of natural riding about too. Train station with easy quick access to glasgoe/edinburgh and stirling.

Am happy enough there

I moved to Fife (Dunfermline) a year ago with the better half. I was previously living in Glasgow and don't miss it at all – local riding (from the door) is better here and it's closer to the proper riding further north. Good transport links to Edinburgh as well as the rest of the central belt. Plus if you moved here you could come along to one of Stuartie_C's masochistic MTB training sessions 😮

I'm living in a little village just north of glasgow at the moment (technically not glasgow) and it's fine, no kickings to be had, no knuckle dragging to note. I've been looking for a house for the last 12 months and not seen one I wanted, but I've visited loads of places both N,S and E of glasgow and while there are a few places I'd rather not re-visit, at least 50% of them have been friendly, small and fairly well placed for riding not too far away. I wonder if some of the locals have misconceptions about areas that newcomers (and englishfolk!) don't see, history etc.

That said, I have absolutely no interest in spending my time in the pubs, watching football etc, so so long as I'm left alone on my own property or going to the shops I have little interest in others. One to note, which I've been slightly baffled by, is glenboig. My god did everyone I asked about it tell me to run away, well I went for a drive out there, seems fairly nice (on the eastern side of town) and stopped at the local shops, spoke to a few locals, all seemed friendly. Houses were reasonably priced and not jammed together.

What "little village" coffeeking? Just nosey as I have lived in Strathblane, Killearn and Kirkintilloch

Hillfoots (going from Stirling and working East) – Blairlogie (last village in the Stirling area), Menstrie (first village in Clackmananashire of the hillfoots), Alva, Tillicoultry, Dollar (nice but very remote from any services and full of very affluent and (what appear to be) stuck up people, Yetts of Muckart and Pools of Muckhart.

Depending on where the majority of your work is, I'd look at Menstrie, Alva and Tillicoultry (if most work is south of the Ochils as the round trip via Bridge of Allan to join the A9 will add time) – if North is going to be more then Tillicoultry and further West as you can cut through the Ochils and join the A9 at Gleneagles – this is a great road but does get closed in real bad weather (although you can use the other access and join the motorway at Milnathort).

All the villages are fine, they are like anywhere else, they have bad spots and good spots but most of the bad spots are only there if you go looking (that's not to say everyone is saintly and all that, but it's very veryr are that trouble lands on your doorstep unannounced).

Riding is great, access to a lot of nice bits…I'd suggest Menstrie or Alva if you were wanting to join up with the local bike club (Stirling Bike Club) and it's also handy for your bike shop needs.

If you are looking about this area, feel free to drop me an email, I won't know specifics but could help out somehow if you have general queries as I live in this neck of the woods…

Blindmelon –
Give us a shout when you do move to Stirling and we'll blow your socks off with the local trails and then you can buy us all a beer in the brewery.

If you like to ride trails from your doorstep look at Stirling / Bridge of Allan (2mins from motorway) with just about all areas having access to trails. The villages south of the Forth can be cheap to rent too – undeserved reputation being ex-mining but great folk (I lived in Fallin for 10yrs). From the Cornton area I can do Dumyat & back in 1hr 40 from my front door. IMO: Hillfoots – Menstrie, Alva etc – have a busy road linking to Stirling but you can access the Ochils directly.

To get an idea what we're talking about there's some photies here:
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Give us a shout when you do move to Stirling and we'll blow your socks off

now theres a welcoming offer from a bike club 🙂

Thanks davidrussell (for the earlier post not the socks offer)

Sorry but as a woman I just couldn't live in a town called Menstrie (think about it)

TJ – Torrance. Kirky does have some rough spots but the outer edges are pretty nice. Wouldn't want to live around the hillhead area but out iona way direction it seems fairly quiet and pleasant (looking at a house there at the moment). What are strathblane and killearn like, they've been on my possibles list for a while.