The Cridford Inn, Trusham

The Cridford Inn

Trusham, Newton Abbot TQ13 0NR

Grade C · TraditionTrading · checked Sept 2026

The Cridford Inn claims AD 825. The records say 1982.

Claimed

AD 825

First record

1982

Building

no single date

The building. House, said to have been a nunnery, now an inn: probably C15/C16 with floors inserted in the C16 and C17 (Historic England 1146542). Rendered stone rubble and cob walls under a corrugated iron roof, originally thatched with gable ends; a four-room plan with a curved front wall, a slightly serpentine rear wall and a bowed stair projection. A C16 oak mullioned window of four ogee-headed chamfered lights survives to the ground floor right, with the rebate for its shutter in the outer frame, and the roof is an oak jointed cruck structure — we give it no single date because Historic England dates the house probably C15/C16, and records the 1081 only as a date said to have been seen in a mosaic under the floor.

Thatched

Rooms

Food

Real ale

Beer garden

Dog friendly

The claim

Tucked into the Teign valley, the Cridford calls itself Devon's oldest pub, dating its story to 825. In truth it was a farmhouse until 1982, but the longhouse itself is old: Historic England puts it at probably the 15th or 16th century, under a corrugated iron roof that was once thatch. A 16th-century oak mullioned window survives in the bar. Today it is a village inn with rooms.

What the records show

The building is a genuinely old listed Devon longhouse, but it was a farmhouse until it was made into a pub and restaurant in August 1982, which CAMRA's South Devon branch states as plainly as the inn does. Historic England lists it grade II, under the spelling Crideford Inn, and first listed it on 2 July 1986 — four years after the conversion, so the register knows the building as an inn and says nothing about how long it has been one. The full entry was read on 17 September 2026 and it is worth reading for three reasons. It dates the house: probably fifteenth or sixteenth century, with floors inserted in the sixteenth and seventeenth, rendered stone rubble and cob under a corrugated iron roof that was originally thatched, on a four-room plan with a curved front wall and a bowed stair projection. It describes the window the house is proud of without endorsing the claim made for it — a sixteenth-century oak mullioned window of four ogee-headed chamfered lights, with the rebate for its shutter still in the outer frame — while the house calls it possibly the earliest surviving domestic window in England, which is the house's assessment and nobody else's. And it handles the 1081 exactly as this site would: the register records that a date of 1081 in a mosaic floor beneath the cobbled floor is said to have been seen when repairs were carried out, which is a report of a report and is not a dating. The same entry is candid about how much of what a visitor sees arrived with the conversion: the leaded glass in the windows is of about 1980, the fireplace in the third room has granite jambs and an ovolo-moulded lintel brought from another building and inserted below the original one at about the same date, and a stair with solid oak treads was taken out of the fourth room then too. The 825 and the Domesday link are the inn's own claims and nothing published by anybody else supports them.

Dated evidence for The Cridford Inn, earliest first
Year	What	Source
AD 825	Claimed founding	The pub
1982	First record of a drinking house here	Historic England

What to look for inside

Medieval stained-glass mullion window in the bar
Cobbled floor with a mosaic dated 1081, found in 1988
Converted from a farmhouse to an inn in 1982

Visiting

The Cridford Inn is in Trusham, England, at Trusham, Newton Abbot TQ13 0NR. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

thecridfordinn.co.uk Directions in your maps app