DAVID WALKER, FORMER Chief Inspector for Historic Scotland, who spent a lifetime studying and recording historic buildings, came to the conclusion that ‘no surviving building in Scotland, proven to have been built as an inn, is older than the seventeenth century’, though earlier origins are claimed for a number of sites, including Tarbert, Loch Lomond, Dunbartonshire, which has a recorded history dating back to the sixteenth century. The problem is that, though some Scottish pubs claim to have been founded from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, they have usually been rebuilt on the site of an earlier building or housed in an older building that was not built as an inn or a pub. In Edinburgh, the White Hart Inn at 34 Grassmarket is one of the oldest surviving inns in the capital, dating back to 1516, though only the cellars survive from this time, the present building dating from 1740.

Some of the oldest inn and pub buildings in Scotland are situated in historic burghs, away from the pressures of redevelopment to be found in cities and larger urban centres. In Haddington, East Lothian, the former Bluebell Inn is a three-storeyed building, with a corbelled stair tower at the front, which dates from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries. In the royal burgh of Falkland in Fife, the Stag Inn is dated 1630, while the Falkland Arms, another old inn, has an inscription dated 1607, from when it was a house. Falkland is the likely home of Kind Kittock, the Fife alewife or ‘Guddame’, the central character of William Dunbar's poem The Ballad of Kind Kittock, so it seems an appropriate place to find early inns. In another royal burgh, Linlithgow in West Lothian, the Four Marys pub on the High Street opposite Linlithgow Palace is housed in a building dating back to about 1500, though it began life as a house and was a chemist's shop in the nineteenth century.

At Laurencekirk in Kincardineshire, the Boar's Head, now the Gardenstone Arms, has a date stone of 1638 but was rebuilt by Lord Gardenstone between 1770 and 1778 as part of a planned village. In Moffat, Dumfriesshire, the oldest inn is the Black Bull, opposite the parish church.