The Clare Valley's nineteenth-century pubs were built for the copper route and the coach trade. The best of them still pour, feed and house travellers today.
Before the Clare Valley was wine country it was thoroughfare country: copper rolling south from Burra, coaches rolling north from Adelaide, and bullock teams in between. All of them were thirsty, and the pubs built to serve them are still trading a century and a half later.
The bullocky's rest
The Magpie & Stump Hotel in Mintaro is the most evocative of the lot. Completed in December 1850 at the entrance to the slate village, it served the bullock drivers hauling Burra copper to Port Wakefield; burnt down in 1904, it was rebuilt the same year and has been restored in recent times with its history intact. The beer garden on a warm afternoon, with the heritage village within strolling distance, is one of the valley's great simple pleasures.
The village local
At Sevenhill, the Sevenhill Hotel holds down the centre of the valley — a stone country pub on the main touring road where cellar-door staff, cyclists off the Riesling Trail and locals all wash up at the same front bar. The kitchen leans on regional produce and the wine list reads like a roll call of neighbours.
The coaching inn
Auburn's Rising Sun Hotel wears its coaching-era bones proudly: thick stone walls, low verandahs and a dining room that has fed travellers on the Main North Road for generations. It makes a natural finish to the town's heritage walk.
The farm pub
The Watervale Hotel has become something rarer — a country pub with its own organic farm supplying the kitchen, where the cooking has ambitions well beyond schnitzel night (though tradition is honoured too). Stay nearby in the converted Victorian schoolhouse at Stanley Grammar Country House and you have a complete Watervale evening within a hundred metres.
Why the old pubs survived
The answer is in the stone. These buildings were too solid to demolish and too central to ignore, so each generation found them a new use: coach stop, mine canteen, tourist local. The wine boom gave them their latest act — and arguably their best audience.
Hungry for more? Our guide to where to eat and drink in the Clare Valley covers the full table.
