Old Ship Inn, Perth — claims 1665

Old Ship Inn

31 High Street, Perth PH1 5TJ

Grade C · TraditionTrading · checked Sept 2026

Old Ship Inn claims 1665. No earlier record has been found.

Claimed

1665

First record

none found

Building

no single date

The building. Four storeys and an attic, stuccoed with shops at street level, dated 1774 at the gable to George Street; part of the listed range at 21-31 High Street (Historic Environment Scotland LB39463).

Real ale

Whisky

The claim

The Old Ship is tucked off Perth's High Street at the Skinnergate, and dates itself to 1665, when ships still tied up at the foot of the street. A refurbishment in early 2026 kept the long bar, the oil painting of a sailing ship and the first-floor room, now the Speakeasy. CAMRA's Tayside branch has made it Perth City Pub of the Year four years running, and it keeps three changing cask beers.

What the records show

1665 is the pub's own date, and CAMRA's Tayside branch repeats it as what the house is said to date from. No licence, deed or map entry has been traced for it. The listing has now been read rather than set aside. Historic Environment Scotland's statutory address for LB39463 is High Street 21-31, north side, odd numbers, and the inn gives its own address as 31 High Street, so the house falls inside the listed range; the record states that the statutory address is the only legal part of a listing and that a building is still listed even where its name is missing from that address. What the description dates is the range rather than the house: four storeys and an attic, stuccoed, with shops at street level, architraves to Nos 27 and 29 and piended dormers at Nos 23 and 25, dated 1774 at the gable to George Street, with monograms read as those of Elspeth Cunningham and Robert Graham. So the walls the bar occupies are a century younger than the year the house puts over its door, and 1665 stands as the pub's own.

What to look for inside

CAMRA Tayside Perth City Pub of the Year 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026
Upstairs lounge reopened in 2018 after twenty years shut, now the Speakeasy
Named for the harbour that once stood at the foot of the High Street

Visiting

Old Ship Inn is in Perth, Scotland, at 31 High Street, Perth PH1 5TJ. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

oldshipinnperth.co.uk Directions in your maps app