Dunoon

Dunoon sits along the Cowal coast with the look of a town built for sea views rather than passing trade — solid Victorian terraces, a promenade, and a pace set by ferries and retirees rather than commuters. The median age here is 52, a decade above the Scotland-wide average, and that shows in the streets: this is a place people settle into rather than pass through on their way up a career ladder.

The housing picture backs that up. A median price around £183,500 is modest by national standards, and prices have been drifting upward gently rather than sharply — the kind of steady, unspectacular movement that suits people not watching the market nervously. Council tax under a Band D property runs slightly below the Scotland-wide median too, which matters more here than it might elsewhere, given the area sits low on both the income and wider deprivation scales — decile 2 for income, decile 4 for overall deprivation. That combination — cheap housing, modest incomes, low tax — is the quiet arithmetic of a lot of Scottish coastal towns: affordable to buy into, but not a place of high wages.

Day-to-day, Dunoon has more green space than the numbers alone suggest — nearly 28 separate pieces of it, humble in total hectares but enough to give the town a genuine outdoor rhythm, whether that's a walk along the shore or up into the hills behind. The grades tell an interesting story too: health provision here rates strongly, as does the nightlife offer for a town this size, and the environment grade sits comfortably above the Scottish average. Safety is currently good on paper but marked as worsening, which is the one thread worth watching rather than ignoring — nothing dramatic, but a direction, not just a blip. Broadband is the other soft spot: full fibre coverage sits close to a fifth of properties, meaning a working-from-home setup here needs checking street by street rather than assumed.