Lochinver sits on the edge of Assynt, where the road runs out along the harbour and the working boats still outnumber anything you'd call a tourist trap. It's the kind of place where the pier does double duty — landing langoustines by morning, drawing a slow trickle of walkers and campervans by afternoon — and where the mountains behind the village, Suilven chief among them, do more to define daily life than any planning document could. You won't find a high street so much as a single bend of shops and a harbourside that decides where everyone naturally ends up. There's no getting around the honest limits of what can be said here with confidence — no fine-grained figures have come through for house prices, school performance, transport links or crime in this particular pull, so I won't pretend to a precision the place hasn't offered up. What can be said is the shape of it: this is remote, rural Scotland, a fair distance from any city, where daily life is built around distance itself — to the nearest big supermarket, to the nearest hospital, to the nearest secondary school — rather than around a commute in the conventional sense. If you're weighing this up against a Scottish average, the whole framing shifts; Lochinver isn't competing with Inverness or Edinburgh on density or amenity, it's offering something else entirely, a working coastal village at the foot of genuinely dramatic hills. What you're really deciding on, in the absence of the usual spreadsheet of scores, is whether you want a life organised around weather, tide, and single-track roads rather than around timetables and postcodes. People who end up here tend to have made peace with that already — it suits those who want space, quiet, and a landscape that does the heavy lifting on quality of life, and it asks a lot of anyone still tethered to city routines. Whether you'd regret it depends less on any number and more on how you feel about the nearest big shop being a proper drive away.