The Spaniard, Kinsale — claims 1650

The claim

A low, dark house on the hill at Scilly, above the harbour and ten minutes' walk from the middle of Kinsale, with open fires, flagged floors and fishing gear on the walls. The bars open from half past ten and there is a restaurant upstairs known for fish landed at the port. Traditional music sessions. The name dates from the 1960s and honours the Spanish commander at Kinsale in 1601.

What the records show

The house's own history page says it was built on the foundations of a castle in or about 1650, that it was first called the Castle Bar and kept by the Coleman family of Scilly, and that it has been a pub almost ever since. The present name is recent by comparison: the owners took it in the 1960s for the Spanish commander at Kinsale in 1601. None of the seventeenth-century account has been traced to a record. The national inventory has now been searched rather than left open, and it holds nothing for the house: within two hundred metres of the pub the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage records eleven buildings and structures at Scilly — Prospect Villa, Raffeen, Nos 1 to 5 Scilly Terrace, an early nineteenth-century office, the dry dock, the pier and a post box of about 1930 with the Saorstát Éireann insignia — and no entry for the Spaniard. The surveyors walked this hill and did not write the pub down, so nothing independent dates its fabric, and the grade stays at C rather than B. What is not in doubt is the trade today: the bars keep their own hours from half past ten in the morning, separately from the restaurant upstairs, and the house is mapped as a pub.

What to look for inside

Said by the house to have been built on castle foundations and first called the Castle Bar
Renamed in the 1960s for Don Juan del Águila, who led the Spanish force at Kinsale in 1601
Stands in the townland of Scilly, named for Cornish sailors who settled there

Visiting

The Spaniard is in Kinsale, Ireland, at Scilly, Kinsale, County Cork, P17 Y156. 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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