I am looking for the best wallet to safely store my bitcoin for the next lot of years (who knows how long) is bitcoin core a safe place to do this or should i look at others?
Bitcoin core is safe compared on web wallets because you have the private keys and you would able to retrieve it back when theres unexpected circumtances might happen in your bitcoin. If you are making secure on your bitcoin better to keep on cold storage paper wallets or trezor and other hardware.
Some online wallets actually let you create copy of your private keys, export it, store and import later to software wallet of your choice - for example Blockchain.info has this feature.
Bitcoin Core is the first and the longest developed bitcoin wallet. It is open sourced and it is probably the most trusted bitcoin wallet available.
If you want to learn more about it, I recommend this article:
http://www.coindesk.com/original-bitcoin-wallet-still-matter/I am using Bitcoin Core myself and the only con I found so far is that some antiviruses report bitcoin-qt.exe as harmful file containing virus/malware.