Jen Taylor

Some adventurers love the excitement of big city life and others prefer the quiet of the countryside. Jen Taylor chose the latter when she moved from northern Scotland to a tiny village near Aubusson in the Limousin region of central France.

Taylor is no stranger to rural settings. She was born in the south of Scotland and raised in Elgin, a small town in “whiskey country,” about an hour northwest of Aberdeen. Her dad was a microbiologist and her mum a midwife.

She met her husband Neil in high school when she was just 16 but marriage came after she earned a law degree at the University of Aberdeen in 1993 and a trip around the world with Neil.

“We worked in France and Spain, traveled throughout Europe and then lived in Thailand briefly before settling for a while in Australia,” she said. “Unfortunately, Australia did not work out that well for us. While traveling between Sydney and Melbourne we had a bad automobile accident and I was hospitalized for nearly three months.”

Returning to Scotland after the ordeal, the two married in 1994 and Taylor went to work for a law firm for nearly eight years before she and Neil decided to buy her family’s bakery business, which served northeast Scotland through four shops located mostly in small towns.

Along the way, sons Adam and Matt joined the family, followed a few years later by daughter Katie. But as the kids grew, so did Jen’s appetite for a new adventure.

“It started off as a two-year adventure, really,” she said. “We wanted the kids to be bilingual and we thought France would be a good place to do that. After nearly nine years, we are still here.”

In 2007, the couple sold their bakery business and moved to a tiny village not far from Abusson, and just over an hour away from Limoges, a city of 140,000 people.

“We were looking for a place that was very rural, so I searched on the Internet and found a lovely old four-bedroom stone house with a loft for visitors that was built in 1880 in a tiny hamlet in the midst of a heavily-wooded forest area in central France,” she said. “Our village has no signal lights, just two streetlights and 15 people. And we are five of them.”

The family soon added sheep and hens to their property and Neil began working for a local farmer crafting goat cheese. Jen decided to retrain as an English teacher to expand her job possibilities.

“I needed something I could do that was not dependent on the local economy,” she said. “There are more cows than people where we live so I decided to start Taylor English Training, which takes me to many countries around the world.”

Taylor works with universities and business schools to provide intensive English language training on a contract basis. Her first job came through the local Chamber of Commerce office.

“I started teaching English at a business school not far from home in Montluçon,” she said, “and then added the European Business School (EBS) in Wiesbaden, Germany. I also now work a lot for English in Action, which is headquartered in Canterbury, near London. I do contract work in many different countries now, including Russia, Austria, Japan and many others.”

Much of her work comes through word of mouth and the International Association of Teachers for English (IATEFL) conferences in the U.K.