Following the international success of The FOREST Guide to Smoking in London, Britain’s smokers’ rights group plans to launch The FOREST Smoker’s Guide to Scotland at the Edinburgh Festival on August 11.

Scotland is renowned for its hospitality and I hope this will long continue to be extended to the 30 per cent of its adult visitors and inhabitants who enjoy a smoke, said James Leavey, who edited both of FOREST’s London and Scotland guides the world’s first tobacco-tolerant travel books.

FOREST conducted a survey of 162 hotels and other hosts, 119 restaurants and cafes, 108 pubs, every major travel operator and most of Scotland’s major and not a few of the minor tourist attractions and the results are all listed in the new guidebook, which is already selling on the Internet’s largest bookshop website.

Our findings confirm that while most of Scotland’s tourist industry still wants to accommodate smokers, it is being pressurised into making allowances for people who don’t enjoy the smell of tobacco, usually at the expense of those who do, said James Leavey. Which partly explains why the 30 per cent of adults in Scotland who smoke are increasingly finding themselves about as popular as a large sharp bone in a haggis or chlorinated tap water in a single malt.

The bad news for smokers it that Edinburgh and Glasgow are currently trying to ban smoking in public, and nicotine lovers are getting a poor welcome in parts of the Highlands and on some of the Scottish islands. The way things are going we’ll all end up joining Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, who is still in hiding perhaps because she’s a secret smoker!