Settle Inn, Stirling

Settle Inn

Grade B · Building datedTrading · checked Sept 2026

Settle Inn is dated 1733 by CAMRA. No earlier record has been found.

Claimed

1733

First record

none found

Building

no single date

The building. Dated 1733 on the building, with the initials G T E G; two storeys and an attic, four windows wide, stuccoed with crow-stepped gables (Historic Environment Scotland LB41467).

Haunted

The claim

Reputed to be Stirling's oldest pub, the Settle Inn is said to date from 1733, and its listing records that year cut on the building with the initials G T E G. It is a small, traditional bar with folk music sessions, a low-ceilinged back room and a resident ghost story, in a crow-stepped house on St Mary's Wynd that Historic Environment Scotland notes was formerly the Red Lion Inn.

What the records show

The 1733 is CAMRA's: its entry says the Settle Inn was built in 1733 and is the oldest pub in Stirling, and a Scottish round-up repeats both. There is now a second and independent reading of the same year. Historic Environment Scotland listed 91 St Mary's Wynd, the Settle Inn, at category C on 3 February 1978, and its description opens by recording the house as dated 1733 with the initials G T E G — a datestone on the building itself — then describes two storeys and an attic, four windows wide, stuccoed, with crow-stepped gables, a large Victorian canted dormer and a slated roof, and notes the ground floor as badly altered as a public house. Its statement of special interest adds that the house was formerly the Red Lion Inn. So the fabric carries the claimed year and the register records inn use without dating it, which is a grade B: the walls are of the age claimed, and the first record of drink sold in them is later.