9 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
By claim, the oldest pub in Cornwall is the Bush Inn at Morwenstow on the north coast, which cites hospitality on its site from around AD 950. No Cornish pub on this page has produced a document or a scientific date from anywhere near the year it claims, so there is no oldest-by-evidence answer here yet. The nearest thing to hard information runs the other way: CAMRA's heritage survey dates the Grade II listed Tinners Arms at Zennor, which says it was built in 1271, to the early eighteenth century.
Cornwall has nine old pubs on this page and not one documentary record among them, which makes it the most purely traditional county in the collection. There are reasons beyond carelessness. The Cornish building stock is cob, granite and slate, repeatedly patched and rebuilt against Atlantic weather, so the fabric rarely reads as a single date. The Spanish burned Penzance in 1595, taking the town's older buildings with it. Tin and copper filled and then emptied whole villages within a century, and the pubs that survived changed hands and names as the industry moved. Most of the dates repeated for Cornish pubs come from tourism round-ups and the pubs' own websites rather than from county record offices. What the county does have is an unusually clear pattern of where its pubs stand: beside a parish church, or on a quay. That is why the same two founding stories — masons building the church, and smugglers landing the cargo — recur from Morwenstow to the Lizard.
The church-builders’ story appears at the Old Inn at St Breward, high on the edge of Bodmin Moor beside a church of Norman origin, at the Crown at Lanlivery on the Saints’ Way pilgrim route, where a medieval well sits under glass in the porch, and at the Tinners Arms at Zennor, which says it was raised in 1271 for the masons of St Senara’s church. The smuggling story belongs to the harbours: the Turks Head and the Dolphin in Penzance, the Sloop on the wharf at St Ives, and the Pandora on Restronguet Creek, which was the Passage House before it took the name of the ship sent after the Bounty mutineers.
For fabric rather than folklore, the Tinners Arms at Zennor is the one to sit in: a single panelled bar with a fire, folk sessions on Thursdays, and the church of the Mermaid of Zennor next door, where D. H. Lawrence lodged in 1916. For setting, the Bush Inn at Morwenstow stands on the clifftops where Parson Hawker wrote his poetry, and the Pandora can be reached by boat and has a pontoon that fills on summer evenings. For a walk, the Old Inn at Mullion is a natural stop off the Lizard coast path. The wider county comparison is at the oldest pubs in England, and our grading rules are on the methodology page.
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Morwenstow, Cornwall
The pub cites hospitality from around 950 AD and a 13th-century building, and offers no documentation for either. Two searches on 12 September 2026 turned up nothing to support them and two blanks worth recording. Historic England's list holds 23 entries in Morwenstow parish - the church, six chest tombs, the vicarage, Tonacombe Manor, Hawker's hut, the ship's figurehead by the lych gate - and not the inn; the only
St Breward, Cornwall
The 11th-century date, tied to monks building the nearby church, comes from the pub and from tourism lists; no documentary or architectural dating was found. The pub's own about page is more careful than the lists that repeat it: it says the middle bar and kitchens were built in the 11th century as lodging for the monks, that the house is believed to have begun trading as a public house in the 15th century, and that
Lanlivery, Cornwall
The 12th-century date is CAMRA's: its Cornwall entry calls the Crown a 12th-century listed pub on the Saints' Way, and the inn's own website gives no date at all. The listing the grade was recorded from has now been read. Historic England designated the Crown on 28 August 1987 and calls it an inn, probably of early 17th-century origin, with alterations and additions of the later 17th and early 18th centuries, a
Mylor Bridge, Cornwall
The inn's own page claims the 13th century for parts of the building, and says plainly what stood here then: a small farm on the edge of Restronguet Creek. So the claimed date dates a farm rather than a drinking house, which is why the grade is C. The page gives one real record: by 1488 the Restronguet Estate Accounts put the rent at 8s 4d a year, which it calls one of the earliest written references to the place.
Penzance, Cornwall
The 1233 is the pub's own claim. Its website, archived in June 2024, said the house is reputed to date from 1233, when Turks were said to have raided Penzance, and that it was the first inn in England to take the name; the site has since stopped resolving. The hanging sign outside claims only 'the oldest pub in Penzance', with no year. CAMRA calls it a 13th-century pub said to be the oldest in the town. The date and
Zennor, Cornwall
The pub says it was built in 1271 for masons working on St Senara's church, but CAMRA's heritage survey of the Grade II building dates the fabric to the early 18th century. Earlier drinking use on the site is unproven. A second publisher adds a little on each side: John Hobson Matthews, in his history of the parishes of St Ives, Lelant, Towednack and Zennor (1892), dates the south side of the nave at Zennor church
St Ives, Cornwall
'Reputedly from 1312' is repeated by CAMRA and the inn itself, and the building is a 17th- and 18th-century house. Historic England's listing, read on 17 September 2026, says so in as many words: the Sloop is listed Grade II, first listed on 4 June 1952, and described as C17-18, low and L-shaped, of colourwashed granite rubble with a tarred plinth, two storeys, slate-hung above the ground floor on the sides of the
Mullion, Cornwall
CAMRA and the inn describe a 16th-century partly thatched house beside the church. Historic England's entry, read on 17 September 2026, reads it differently: a public house possibly of the late 17th century, with two mid-19th-century wings to the side and rear, the older part whitewashed stone rubble with a cob first floor under a thatched roof with gabled ends and eyebrow eaves, on a two-room plan with a central
Penzance, Cornwall
The 1585, the link to Sir John Hawkins and the story of the first pipe of tobacco smoked in England are local tradition; no documentary proof has been found. A second account, published by Cornish Story at the Institute of Cornish Studies, is franker than the tavern's own and differs from it in two places. It says the age of the building is unknown, placing the granite front somewhere in the fourteenth century
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