Sean's Bar is the oldest pub in the world

The claim

Sean’s Bar stands on Main Street in Athlone, a few steps from the point where the Shannon has been crossed for as long as anyone has kept records. The pub dates itself to around AD 900 and to a man named Luain, who is said to have kept a hostelry at the ford and given the town its Irish name, Áth Luain — Luain’s ford. It is the story on the menus, on the website and, most famously, in the headline “the oldest pub in the world”.

The bar itself does nothing to undercut it. The floor slopes towards the river, the walls are lined with old bottles, and a section of wattle-and-mud partition uncovered during renovation in the 1970s is displayed under glass inside. It looks like the oldest pub in the world.

What Guinness actually certified

In 2004 Guinness World Records issued Sean’s Bar a certificate. The wording matters: it named the bar Ireland’s oldest pub, not the world’s. The step from Ireland to the world came later, largely through travel writing and repetition, and Guinness no longer maintains a category of that kind at all.

An award for the oldest pub in Ireland is not nothing. It is also not a document. It records that a panel accepted a case; it does not put a name, a date and a drinking house on the same page of the same register.

What the building shows

The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage dates the present building to about 1725 and describes it as a former coaching inn. Its account of the wattle partitions found in the 1970s is more cautious than the one repeated in the press: possibly seventeenth century, not tenth. Wattle-and-daub was ordinary building practice in Ireland for centuries, so old wattle tells you the wall is old, not that it is a thousand years old.

The first written record of a drinking house on the site is from 1738, when it appears as the Three Blackamoor Heads. That is a real, dated, checkable record — and it is 838 years after the date on the sign.

The Dublin and Kilkenny rivals

Ireland has two other pubs with claims of the same order, and they fail in different ways.

On documents alone, the Brazen Head’s name is on record in Dublin from 1613 — the earliest of the three — with an ale licence in 1661 and clear use as an inn by 1668. Kyteler’s Inn has the oldest fabric: the heritage record puts the origins of its stone house at about 1275, which is why it grades B where the other two grade C. Its association with Dame Alice Kyteler, tried for witchcraft in 1324, is genuine history; that she kept an inn in this building is tradition.

None of the three can show a medieval pub. Two of them can show a medieval or early-modern building, which is a different and more interesting claim.

Is Sean’s Bar closing?

No, and the rumour has a date on it. Type the pub’s name into a search box and the suggestions offer “closing”, which traces back to a single day. The Westmeath Independent reported on 23 October 2024 that Sean’s Bar would shut for all of the following day as a mark of respect after the sudden death of its owner, Phil Byrne. One day’s closing notice, repeated and stripped of its reason, became a rumour that the oldest bar in the world was going.

It was not. The same paper reported in May 2025 that the bar took Pub of the Year at the Irish Restaurant Awards under Cathy Byrne, and on 30 July 2026 listed it among the Athlone venues hosting sessions for Féile na Sionainne. No sale, no closure and no closure plan appears in any source from 2025 or 2026. It is open seven days a week.

So which is the oldest pub in the world?

It depends entirely on what you will accept as proof.

By claim, the oldest is the Old Ferry Boat Inn in Cambridgeshire, which says AD 560 and can show nothing at all for it. By documents, the strongest cases are far less famous: places where a named person is recorded selling ale in a named building in a particular year. Our top 100 oldest pubs shows both answers at once, which is the only honest way to publish a list like this.

Sean’s Bar is a very old pub in a very old crossing town, and the wattle in the wall is real. The tenth century is a story. Both of those things can be true at the same time, and the pint is no worse for it.

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