14 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
Oldest claim
Says AD 800. No document from that date has been found.
Grade C · TraditionBy claim, the oldest pub in Wales is the Skirrid Inn at Llanvihangel Crucorney below the Skirrid mountain, which advertises more than 900 years of trade and a date of about 1110. Cadw's listing calls it "a fine C17 purpose built inn" and says plainly that it is not medieval. No Welsh pub here can produce a document from its claimed date, and the oldest fabric belongs to a different house altogether: the Blue Anchor Inn at East Aberthaw, painted "Est. 1380" but dated by Cadw to a mid-sixteenth-century hall house.
Wales has fewer very old pubs on record than England, and rather better commentary on the ones it has. Cadw's listing descriptions are unusually direct about publicans' claims: the entry for the Skirrid Inn calls it a fine seventeenth-century purpose-built inn and states that it is not medieval, while the entry for the Blue Anchor at East Aberthaw notes the "Est. 1380" on its wall before dating the house to the middle of the sixteenth century. That candour is useful, because it means the Welsh argument is usually about a century or two rather than about eight hundred years. The physical pattern is distinctive too: thatched stone houses set against churchyard walls, long low ranges with great fireplaces and bread ovens, and in the north the timber-framed merchants' houses of the walled towns of Beaumaris and Caernarfon, which became inns generations after they were built. Two of the pubs on this page closed within the last decade and reopened after expensive restoration, which is a kind of survival in itself.
Wales is the clearest illustration on this site of why a listing entry beats a signboard. The Skirrid Inn is a genuinely fine building with a fine oak staircase, and its ghost stories about hangings from the stair beam are undocumented in every sense. The Old House at Llangynwyd puts 1147 in its name and stands beside a church dedicated to St Cynwyd, which is the kind of setting that generates such dates. The Blue Anchor is the one where the fabric does much of the arguing for itself: thick limestone walls, thatch that has survived fires in 1922, 2004 and 2009, and chamfered beams over oak-lintelled hearths.
North Wales contributes a different type. The George & Dragon in Beaumaris and the Black Boy in Caernarfon both sit inside towns laid out around Edwardian castles, and both began as houses for people with money rather than as drinking places. The Black Boy’s Welsh street name, Stryd Pedwar a Chwech — Four-and-Six Street — is said to record the price of a sailor’s night’s lodging. Further inland, the Lion at Trellech describes itself as a 1580 coaching inn, brewhouse and smallholding, and still holds cider and perry festivals. For the wider picture see the oldest pubs in the UK and England, and for our grading rules the methodology.
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Llanelian-yn-Rhos, Conwy
The 1,200-year claim has been traced to one place only: a 2024 holiday-letting blog, which attributes it to the inn itself. North Wales Live gives late 14th to early 15th century. Cadw's full report, read on 17 September 2026, gives the only reading of the building by anybody with the building in front of them: the White Lion Public House, listed Grade II on 2 July 1998, is a second-quarter 19th-century inn with
Llanvihangel Crucorney, Monmouthshire
Cadw's listing calls it a fine C17 purpose-built inn and says it is not medieval despite its claims. The Glamorgan-Gwent Historic Environment Record, now kept by the Heneb HER Charitable Trust, says the same from its own survey work: record 01623g describes a mid-to-late 17th-century building that appears to have been purpose-built as an inn, with 17th-century roof timbers, ground-floor ceilings, oak stair and door
Llangynwyd, Bridgend
Cadw's listing describes a later-17th-century thatched house extended in the 18th and 19th centuries, with no medieval fabric noted. The Glamorgan-Gwent Historic Environment Record, now Heneb, agrees from its own file: record 02034m gives a 17th-century core with 18th- and 19th-century additions and a modern extension, two storeys under a thatched roof. The Royal Commission's National Monuments Record carries it as
Henllan, Denbighshire
North Wales Live, Visit Wales and a 2024 holiday-cottage blog repeat a 13th-century date. Cadw's full report for the Llindir, read on 17 September 2026, gives a different reading: a storeyed building of several phases, the earliest probably late 16th-century, traditionally always an inn though perhaps beginning as a farmhouse, with a crow-stepped gable now swallowed by a raised roofline, the stone walling of the
East Aberthaw, Vale of Glamorgan
Cadw notes the 'Est. 1380' claim but dates the thatched limestone house to the mid-16th century. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales records the same house as an inn in its national database and adds a reading of its own: it was probably built as a house, and its position and the way it grew suggest it became a public house early in its life. Two bodies therefore date the standing
Monknash, Vale of Glamorgan
The 1383 on the pub's own page belongs to the monastic grange at Monknash, the richest estate of the Cistercian abbey at Neath, whose barn and dovecote are separately listed a field away. The listing describes the pub itself as an early seventeenth-century lobby-entry house, extended early in the eighteenth, and the pub's own history agrees that a lobby-entry house of that kind was built after the dissolution of
Kenfig, Bridgend
CAMRA's guide entry says this inn dates from the 15th century; CAMRA's own heritage record, and Wikipedia's account of Kenfig, describe a building that began as the Kenfig Corporation guildhall, raised on pillars in the early 17th century and largely rebuilt in 1808, serving as town hall, courthouse and even a mortuary for sailors washed ashore, with the judges' benches and some 17th-century panelling still in the
Beaumaris, Isle of Anglesey
Cadw listed the house Grade II* on 23 September 1950 and dated it probably 1610, from a date recorded on a roof truss in the 1930s and since concealed; it was originally timber-framed with a jettied upper storey, and the present front is a twentieth-century remodelling after the pub absorbed the house and shop to the south. The 1410 the house is known by is raised lettering on a rendered band between the storeys
Beaumaris, Isle of Anglesey
Cadw listed the inn Grade II* on 23 September 1950 and dates it to the seventeenth century, recording a painted sign that once carried 1617, a rebuilding and enlargement in 1766 lettered on a rainwater head, and only a stair surviving from the earlier house; the plan the building has now is on the town plan of 1829. The 1472 is published by Visit Wales, not by the house: the Inn Collection Group, which has run the
Old Radnor, Powys
Widely described elsewhere as an early fifteenth-century inn, including by CAMRA, but the pub itself says only that it has offered hospitality since the sixteenth century. Cadw's full report agrees with the pub and not with the guidebooks: the house is of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, a former cross-passage timber-framed dwelling whose walls were rebuilt in rubble stone, with large-panel framing still
Caernarfon, Gwynedd
Cadw's listing, number 3905, describes a seventeenth-century house built in several phases, all probably of that century, with the windows altered in the nineteenth and replaced with leaded lights about 1900, and lists it as a rare surviving seventeenth-century building inside the walled town. Nothing in it reaches 1522, so the inn's claim runs about a century ahead of its fabric; the earliest record cited for the
Caerleon, Newport
The 1565 is neither the inn's, which publishes nothing we could find, nor CAMRA's, which gives the 16th century and no year. HistoryPoints, the Welsh local-history project behind the QR plaques on buildings, states that most of this riverside inn dates from about 1565, with the rear section rebuilt probably in the 18th century and the windows reshaped in the early 19th, and that it began as a town house for the
Ty'n-y-Groes, Conwy
Cadw's listing opens with a record rather than a tradition: the house was established as an inn by 1578, when the 'tavarne y Groes' is named in a court order, and it appears again under that name in June 1580. That is drink trade on these premises five years after the 1573 that North Wales Live gives as a first licence, which is why the grade is A. The licence itself has not been seen, and the 1573 is the
Trellech, Monmouthshire
The pub says it was built in 1580 as a coaching inn, brewhouse and smallholding. Cadw's full report, read on 17 September 2026, dates the house to probably about 1700, allowing that it could fall either side of that, with a rear outshut of about 1800 and a second from the late 20th century when the house was refurbished. It describes red sandstone rubble under Welsh slate, a two-storey and garret central-entry plan
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