The Bleeding Horse, Dublin

The claim

A red-brick corner house at the top of Camden Street, ornamented with shallow pilasters and a carved timber pubfront, with a galleried room upstairs. Sheridan Le Fanu set a scene in an older house of the same name here in 1845, James Clarence Mangan and Oliver St John Gogarty drank in it, and Joyce mentions it in Ulysses. It keeps long hours, shows sport and serves food from noon.

What the records show

The pub says the house goes back at least to the seventeenth century, when this was St Kevin's Port, and offers two accounts of the name: a farrier who bled horses at the inn, and a horse wounded at the Battle of Rathmines in 1649. The wording on its site is the Wikipedia article's, word for word, so those two are one source and not two. The independent record is the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, which dates the standing building 1865-1875, names Andrew Wren as the man who rebuilt it in 1871 to R.J. Stirling's designs, and says it stands on the site of an earlier inn without dating that inn. Something older was here; how much older is not established, so the earliest drinking-house date that can be cited is the purpose-built public house of 1871, and the grade is C. Sheridan Le Fanu's novel The Cock and Anchor, published in 1845, describes the Bleeding Horse as already old and hangs a painted sign outside it, which is suggestive and is not a record. The inventory also confirms the pub's account of a spell as the Falcon Inn. Read again on 18 September 2026 from the survey's own data, the record adds two things. The bar a drinker stands at is not old fabric: the timber interior is traditional in style and was reconstructed about 1992. And Camden Street was St Kevin's Port until it was renamed for Charles Pratt, first Earl Camden, in 1778, so the older name the pub reaches for is real and dates the street rather than the house. Dublin City Council's Record of Protected Structures for the development plan of 2022 to 2028 does not protect this building. The nearest entries are numbers 1 to 7 Camden Street Upper, about thirty metres off on the other side of the road, and the search was checked against a control: the council's own point for number 1 falls within half a metre of the national survey's position for the same house, so the absence is a search and not a mismatch of coordinates. A building the national survey rates of regional importance and the council's list leaves out is worth saying aloud, and it changes nothing about the age.

Dated evidence for The Bleeding Horse, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1600	Claimed founding	The pub
c.1871	Present building	https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/buildings-search/building/50110427/bleeding-horse-24-25-camden-street-upper-charlotte-way-dublin-2-dublin
1871	First record of a drinking house here	National Inventory of Architectural Heritage

What to look for inside

Rebuilt in 1871 for Andrew Wren to designs by R.J. Stirling, on the site of an earlier inn
Described as the "genuine old Bleeding Horse" in Sheridan Le Fanu's novel The Cock and Anchor, 1845
Renamed the Falcon for part of the 1960s before the old name was restored

Visiting

The Bleeding Horse is in Dublin, Ireland, at 24-25 Camden Street Upper, Dublin 2, D02 NP22. 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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