Following reports of our 24,727-pub tour in 2016, we were rightly grilled on Reddit by fans of the Isle of Skye's public houses.
"This map is really inaccurate, it shows that there are no pubs on the Isle of Skye on the west coast of Scotland when there are 3 pubs in a tiny village of a couple hundred people where my family are from, not to mention the countless other pubs on the rest of the island."
"Yeah I think they just gave up when they got to the west coast of Scotland."
"The map is just wrong, it misses the entirety of Skye, ..."
"There's loads of pubs on the Isle of Skye, no idea why this map shows as having none."
"There is one great pub missing. The Stein Inn on the Isle of Skye which is Skye's oldest pub."
The commenters were right. The 2016 pubs tour has no stops on the Isle of Skye and the route even avoids any travel on the island. Ouch!
My apologies to the fine men and women of the Stein Inn. Rest assured that we pass through the Stein and the enchanting Waternish peninsula in the new tour.
Here is a list of the 26 pubs the new tour visits on the Isle of Skye. The number on each line gives the position of the stop in the tour. Note that 23 of the pubs appear consecutively in a single path around the island, while the remaining three pubs, in Kyleakin, are picked up in a back-and-forth walk along the A87 from Kyle of Lochalsh. The link for each pub points to its page on Pubs Galore.
We owe a word of explanation for why we missed these excellent pubs in our 2016 tour.
The "for some reason" is simply the names of the establishments. At the point of our research program in 2015, we needed an example of approximately 25,000 stops. The Pubs Galore data base contained about twice this number, so we pruned the list based on names, that to a naive foreigner did not sound like traditional pubs. This included removing any listing that contained "Hotel", "Inn", or "Bar". This alone knocked out 25 of the 26 stops on the Isle of Skye. Again, apologies for missing out on a highlight of Scotland.
