Mermaid Tavern, Herm

The claim

Herm's pub, in the small harbour village a short boat ride from St Peter Port, with a courtyard, a fire and Liberation's Herm Island Gold on the bar. No founding date is published for the house: the island's own history dates an inn on Herm to 1810, and no earlier mention of the Mermaid has been traced than the night in January 1952 when a drifting mine blew its windows in.

What the records show

Nobody publishes a founding date for this house, so the year on this page comes from a record rather than from the house, and no earlier mention of it has been traced. That record is a good one. The Priaulx Library prints a contemporary account of the night of 4 January 1952, when a wartime mine drifting off the coast exploded close in, the island's twenty-eight inhabitants were lucky to escape injury, and the people inside the Mermaid Tavern threw themselves to the floor — one of them standing at the bar, another leaving a squiggle of chalk down the darts scoreboard as he went down. A tavern with a bar and a darts board is a drinking house by any test, and that is what the grade rests on. Two older dates belong to the island rather than to this building, and nothing traced joins either to it. Herm's own history page says the island was leased as farmland and an inn established in 1810. Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of 1831, reprinted by the Priaulx, records that Jonathan Duncan, who took the granite quarries, built houses for four hundred workmen, an inn, a brewery, a bakehouse and forges — so there was certainly an inn on Herm by 1831, and no publisher says it was this one. What the house says of itself is a name and a trade: the island's page gives the Mermaid its name from an old cargo boat that brought supplies over, and calls it a fishermen's pub to begin with. Whether you can drink here without eating is not in doubt. OpenStreetMap maps it as a pub, CAMRA records cask ale with Liberation's Herm Island Gold as the house beer and real ale and cider festivals in June and September, and the island publishes a bar list and a whisky and rum list beside the food menus. The doors open at eleven and the kitchen at noon. The trading and the season come from the island company's own calendar — open daily through October, shut on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1 November, open daily over Christmas and closed altogether from 4 January to 4 February — which carries dated events through this autumn; CAMRA last updated its entry on 15 March 2025. One thing is unchecked rather than absent: Guernsey's protected buildings register would say whether this building is protected, and gov.gg answered 500 to every request made of it on 12 September and again on 25 October 2026.

Dated evidence for Mermaid Tavern, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1952	Claimed founding	No published claimant
1952	First record of a drinking house here	Priaulx Library, from a 1952 account

What to look for inside

The island's only pub besides the Ship Inn, seventy yards away
A mine exploded off the harbour on 4 January 1952 while the bar was full
Real ale and cider festivals in June and September

Visiting

Mermaid Tavern is in Herm, Guernsey, at Herm Island GY1 3HR. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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