Stranraer

Stranraer's high street still has the bones of a working harbour town — squat stone terraces, a mix of independent shops and the kind of empty units that tell you the ferry traffic to Northern Ireland moved on some years back. It attracts an older, settled population rather than young arrivals chasing opportunity; the median age here is a good few years above the Scotland-wide figure, and it reads less like a commuter town and more like somewhere people have simply stayed.

Housing is the clearest signal of where Stranraer sits nationally: a median price under £170,000 against a Scottish deprivation ranking in the more deprived third of areas puts this firmly among the country's more affordable towns, not one of its aspirational ones. That affordability is trending in the right direction — prices have been on a gentle upward path over the medium term, not a spike, which suits an area where council tax bills also sit noticeably below the Scottish median. It's a place where a For Sale board tends to mean a realistic asking price rather than a bidding war. Schooling is modest in scale — six schools serving the town — which fits a place sized for its own population rather than for a wider catchment.

The green space count is generous for a town this size, and the environment grade backs that up strongly, so the appeal here is genuinely outdoor: the loch, the coastline, the walking rather than the nightlife (which, oddly, also grades well — a small-town scene that punches above its size). Health provision grades strongly too, which matters more in a town with an older population than it would somewhere younger. The one grade that breaks the pattern is safety, sitting at C+ against a run of As and Bs elsewhere — worth noting rather than alarming, and the trend there is flat rather than worsening, so it's a steady known quantity rather than a slide. Connectivity is mid-table — just over half the town has full fibre, which is serviceable but not cutting-edge.