Jen Taylor

Our Adventurers Abroad February feature takes us to rural France where you’ll meet Jen Taylor and her family, who traded northern Scotland for the quiet 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. 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.”