Houses for sale

[Nix]

Love it, the things I could do with that, very very nice!

[bigpaul]

wish I could get a house like that down here especially at those prices!

[BDG]

Some nice looking places there, looking to move further out myself, just missed out on a good one the week before last - 4 bed stone cottage, couple of acres bounded by woods and farms, woodburners already in and was ripe for being converted to solid fuel central heating, down a private road. Was up for £250K - which if you are a couple on UK average wage each, you can get a mortgage for - we offered 10% under, someone came along and snapped it up before we made another offer.

Stuff it, something else will come up, or I will buy some land and build, seem to be able to get planning a lot easier at the moment.

Now, if you wanted to buy an 'off the shelf' prepper house:

http://www.curlew-sike.co.uk/

Check that out. Damn near as remote as you can get in England - I think the road past it is private, already set up with spring bore hole, big genny, batteries and inverter, solar and wind set up, triple glazing, polytunnel (you will need it up there) and so on.

Thought about buying the place myself but it does not have enough land for me.

[NorthernRaider]

Its a nice area BDG, I have a small BOL in that area just near Whitfield, a lot of my preps and time is invested in that area especially around Alston. If you drive down the A68 from Alston through Weardale its amazing how many off grid type smallholding you can see from the road.

[BDG]

Alston / Allendale / Barnard Castle / Knock in Cumbria area is probably best in England for remoteness. When I first passed my test back when diesel was so cheap you could afford to go for a drive for something to do, I would regularly drive all over between Derwent Reservoir and Cow Green Reservoir.

There are quite a few places that are off grid apart from telephone - the price of getting other services in can run into crazy money depending on the distance. You want a power line in a rural area from a source 500m away - £83,000 please. Works out cheaper to be off grid.

Still a hell of a lot of places up there, old, stone built farm cottages up there that have not been renovated but could be.

[Tarrel]

Curlew Sike looks nice. Great off-grid credentials. I'd put a solid fuel Rayburn in there to back up the oil, although even oil is quite a good prepping heating fuel. If you've got the capital, you can put in as big a tank as you like and keep it topped up. Availability and cost in the future are the main issues.

My main concern would be its proximity to a major city (less than 20 miles from Newcastle city centre as the crow flies).

[BDG]

The only issue I would have with being that close to NCL is if it suffered a Nuclear / Chemical attack that could spread. As the crow flies, it is 20 miles, but by road, it is over 40. Walking direct, you are going to have to cover hill country and moors and go through a lot of areas that would be targets before you got there - that is, if you had any reason to go in that direction.

I think a very small proportion of people will head that way, the vast majority of people have no clue what is on the other side of the A1 apart from country people and guns.