The house cost less than the deposit they had put down in Kent eleven years earlier. Four bedrooms, granite, high ceilings, a garden, ten minutes from a beach that runs for miles.
“We kept waiting for the catch,” says Rose Hensley. “We had the survey done twice.”
The Hensleys are part of a small but noticeable movement: southern households selling into a hot market and buying into a cold one. A year in, they agreed to talk about it honestly, which is rarer in this genre than it should be.
What is better
The money, obviously, and not just the house. “We were both working to stand still,” says Jack. “Here we are not.” He commutes to Aberdeen twice a week — around an hour on the A90 — and works from home otherwise.
The beach they describe as the thing that has surprised them most. “Miles of it and nobody on it. In Kent you queue to park at a beach. Here I have had the whole thing to myself in June.”
And the people. Both were emphatic about this and slightly embarrassed by how emphatic. “Everyone told us we would be incomers for thirty years. It has not been like that at all. The neighbours had us in for our tea in the first fortnight and someone cleared our path in January before we were up.”
What is harder
The wind. Not the cold — both say the cold has been overstated — but the wind, which is constant, and which they had genuinely not factored in. “Nothing stays in the garden,” says Rose. “We have lost two parasols and a bin.”
The dark. Sunset before half three in December, and light that never fully arrives on the worst days. “January was the month we questioned it,” Jack says. “Everybody warns you about the weather. Nobody warns you about the dark.”
And services. They have not found an NHS dentist. Rose is on two waiting lists and drives to Aberdeen for anything urgent. Broadband was resolved eventually and expensively. The nearest large retail park is forty minutes away, which matters more than they expected on a wet Sunday.
“The town has had a hard time of it and you can see that. Anyone moving up here and expecting a picture postcard is going to be unpleasant about a place that has done nothing to them.”
Jack Hensley
The bit nobody says
They are aware of the other side of the arithmetic. The house they could afford easily is one that a local family on local wages could not, and Aberdeenshire wages have not moved the way southern equity has.
“We are not the cause of that,” says Rose. “But we are not not part of it either. We bought a family house that had been empty for two years, which I think is the better end of it. If we had bought it to let out for six weekends a year I would feel differently about the question.”
Would they go back
No, is the short answer, though both say the honest version is that they will know after the third winter rather than the first.
“Give it a year before you decide anything,” Jack says. “And come up in February before you buy. Anyone who views a house here in June is not viewing the house.”
