Garry and Zoe welcome you to The Jolly Sailor Inn.
We are a family run Inn and took over the running of the Pub in 2018. Having never run a pub before, and it needing a lot of love and attention, we both threw ourselves into training, pub management skills and becoming Licensees.
We have two children and two dogs who you will see coming and going around the pub. The children also like to work for us on occasions.
We turned the oldest pub in Looe into, once again, one of the most popular pubs in the town. Within the first year we won ‘Best Newcomers’ and ‘Best Community Hub’ and we were nominated for the finals of the National Breakfast Awards in London (being the only Cornish entrant to reach the final 16)
We followed this up a couple of years later with ‘Best Turnaround Pub in the South’ along with a ‘Highly commended Trip Advisor Award’.
The Jolly Sailor Inn is the oldest Inn in the town of Looe (affectionately known as The Jolly by the locals) and one of the oldest in the UK. The Jolly Sailor was built in 1516 as a drinking hole for the locals.
The main beam in the Jolly was taken from HMS Indefatigable, a ship of the line at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. When the ship was later broken up, the landlord of the time arranged for the beam to be installed in the main bar and it remains there to this day.
Sea faring vessels used to moor right alongside the old part of the Jolly Sailor building, until the land was reclaimed to build the cottages that are now adjacent to the pub.
It soon became involved with Smuggling in the area and many stories have been told about the things that happened in various books over the years.
But beware, many Cornish stories report that the historic rooms of the Jolly are haunted…