5 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
Oldest claim
Says 1360. No document from that date has been found.
Grade C · TraditionBy claim, the oldest pub in Edinburgh is the Sheep Heid Inn at Duddingston, which dates itself to about 1360; Historic Environment Scotland lists an essentially eighteenth-century building. By evidence it is the King's Wark on the Shore at Leith, where an inn is documented in 1623 — almost two centuries after the 1434 the bar takes its name and its date from, which belongs to a royal arsenal rather than to a house of drink.
Most of Edinburgh's claims date something real, and in no case is that thing a pub. The King's Wark is the clearest example and the most useful. James I of Scotland began building the Wark, a royal arsenal and storehouse, on the Shore in 1434; the complex appears in the royal accounts through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was burnt by the English army in 1544, and its tower, drawn by Slezer in 1693, has since been demolished. An inn on the site is documented in 1623, a decade after James VI granted the ground to the innkeeper Bernard Lindsay, whose name is on the street next door. That is a well-evidenced 1434 attached to the wrong kind of building. The pattern repeats around the city: the Golf Tavern's 1456 appears to reach back to traditions of golf on Bruntsfield Links rather than to any recorded alehouse; the White Hart's 1516 is a claim about cellars beneath a house built about 1740; and the Sheep Heid's 1360 comes with a snuffbox from James VI and nothing more. The Cramond Inn, out where the Almond meets the Forth, is the exception that proves the rule: its date is not the pub's claim but the listing's, Historic Environment Scotland putting the north block at about 1670, and nobody has traced when drink was first served in it. Read them together and the city's real interest is not its dates but its habit of borrowing them.
The King’s Wark is where the city’s habit is easiest to see, because its early history is unusually well recorded and belongs entirely to a royal building project. Bernard Street beside it is named for Bernard Lindsay, the innkeeper granted the ground about a decade before the inn appears on record in 1623 — a better founding story than 1434 and a great deal easier to defend. The White Hart Inn does the same manoeuvre downwards rather than backwards, placing its claim in cellars under a house of about 1740. The Golf Tavern borrows from a sport instead of a building. The Sheep Heid Inn is the most-cited of them and rests on tradition alone. The Cramond Inn is the one house here whose date was set by somebody else: Historic Environment Scotland dates its crow-stepped north block to about 1670 and records the later wings and a thorough recasting of 1959-61, which is documented fabric of the claimed age and nothing at all about drink.
These pubs sit in as many different Edinburghs, which is part of the pleasure of visiting them. Duddingston is a village under Arthur’s Seat, and the Sheep Heid’s courtyard and 1880s skittle alley belong to that scale. The Golf Tavern faces open ground at Bruntsfield, one of the oldest places where golf has been played. The Grassmarket sits under the Castle rock, and the White Hart is a compact beamed bar in the middle of it with music most nights. Leith is a working waterfront, and the King’s Wark stands where the Water of Leith meets the docks. Cramond is an old harbour village at the mouth of the Almond, a bus ride out and a different county of the mind. For the country’s wider argument, including Anthony Cooke’s conclusion that nothing in Scotland proven to have been built as an inn predates the seventeenth century, see the oldest pubs in Scotland; the way we weigh a listing entry against a sign is on the methodology page.
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Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh
No documentary support for 1360 was found. The listed building is essentially 18th-century, and the James VI snuffbox story is tradition. Anthony Cooke's history of the Scottish pub finds no surviving purpose-built inn older than the 17th century.
Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh
The bar takes its name and its date from the King's Wark, the royal arsenal and storehouse James I of Scotland began building on the Shore in 1434. That complex is documented in the royal accounts through the 15th and 16th centuries, was burnt by the English army in 1544 and its tower, drawn by Slezer in 1693, has since been demolished. Drink enters the record in 1613: James VI's grant of the Wark to Bernard
Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh
The 1456 comes from secondary lists and seems to attach to traditions of golf on Bruntsfield Links rather than to any documented tavern; no licence, deed or directory entry for it has been traced. The national designations have now been searched around Wright's Houses: within a hundred and fifty metres they hold twenty-six listed buildings, including the tenements at 1-19 Barclay Place next door and the Barclay
Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh
Historic Environment Scotland lists 30-40 Grassmarket, which takes in the White Hart, at category B, and its statement of special interest says records of the inn go back to 1516 — without naming one. So the 1516 is not the pub's alone, but nobody who publishes it points at a document. The tenement itself is about 1740, built by James Lithgow, damaged in a Zeppelin raid in 1916 and restored in 1994-5. CAMRA's
Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh
The 1670 date here is the listing's rather than the pub's. Historic Environment Scotland (LB28603, category B, designated on 14 December 1970 and part of the Cramond A group) dates the north block to about 1670 and identifies it in the sketch used for the cover of John Philip Wood's account of the parish of Cramond, published in 1794 — pitch-roofed with its gable to the street, its dormerheads visible and a walled
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