britains oldest pubs

I found all five pubs in this GeoGuessr challenge. I also spent about 22 minutes on one round because I was looking for a place name that wasn’t a place name. Both things can be true. For a while, my confidence disappeared completely.

A member of my Twitch community, Stuart, made the map for my April 2024 video, using historic British pubs as the locations. I played without a time limit, which was a very sensible choice for me. The game dropped me into street views, and I had to work out where I was before placing a pin on the map. Loving a pub did not turn out to be much help with that last part.

Two rounds that went surprisingly well

The first pub was the Skirrid Inn. At first I thought the unfamiliar name sounded Scottish, then noticed wording describing it as Wales’s oldest pub. That gave me a country to search in. Road signs mentioning Hereford and other nearby places helped narrow it down, although I still had trouble judging how far I should zoom into the map.

I spotted a church and eventually found the inn on the map. I felt confident about the pin, and the result gave me a lovely boost. I was also enjoying the virtual scenery. A pub picnic bench on a sunny day looked like a very good place to be, even if I was actually sitting at my desk.

The second round was much quicker. A sign gave me Bolton, which was a name I recognised and could place roughly near Manchester. From there, I worked back to the pub. I was delighted that the round only took a few minutes. Previous viewers had suggested telephone area codes were obvious clues, but I don’t even know the codes in Canada. A town name was much more useful to me.

The beautiful pub that nearly broke me

Then came the Porch House. It looked gorgeous: warm-coloured stone, lovely neighbouring buildings and picnic benches outside. I noticed “Cotswold” in local business names, which helped me choose a general area to search. I also saw the word Brakspear and treated it as another location clue.

The stone frontage of the Porch House in Stow-on-the-Wold, with its name visible on the wall
The Porch House in Stow-on-the-Wold, photographed in 2021 by Jonathan Thacker, CC BY-SA 2.0. This is a separate photograph of the pub, not my game screenshot.

That was the problem. Brakspear is the pub operator, and its listing puts the Porch House on Digbeth Street in Stow-on-the-Wold. I was searching the map as if Brakspear were the town. The pub name itself was quite distinctive, but I still managed to lose track of that too and had to go back to the starting point to check it.

The longer I looked, the more I panicked. I started scanning faster, even though I knew that wasn’t helping. There were so many place names in such a small area of the map. I tried following roads and reading more signs instead, but those introduced other towns without immediately telling me where the pub was.

Eventually I found wording at another pub describing it as being in Stow-on-the-Wold, followed by a welcome sign for the town itself. Digbeth Street finally came together with the name I needed. I found the Porch House, but that round had absolutely taken the wind out of my sails. My coffee was cold by the time I moved on.

Recovering with two more signs

The fourth round started at the Old Ferry Boat, in a setting that felt very much out in the middle of nowhere. I found the name Holywell, but that alone meant nothing to me. The useful breakthrough came from a school sign mentioning Cambridgeshire County Council. That gave me an area in which to look for the names I’d been seeing.

After the Cotswolds ordeal, getting that location in roughly five minutes felt wonderful. The final pub was in Duddingston. A Church of Scotland sign gave me the country, and a school sign mentioning the City of Edinburgh narrowed it much further. From there, I could find Duddingston and work back to the pub’s corner.

The result screen showed all five pins on target. The rounds took about seven, three, 22, five and five minutes. The third one felt even longer while I was playing, but I got there. It was especially satisfying because I usually need plenty of help when we play together on stream, and this time I was doing it alone.

This was a game built around historic pubs, rather than proof of which pub deserves an oldest-in-Britain title. My main discovery was considerably less grand: a useful sign could save me, provided I understood what the sign was actually naming. Brakspear and I had a very long misunderstanding.

Watch my five-round historic pub GeoGuessr challenge.