Tom Moore's Tavern was built in 1652 as a private home for the Trott family. In those days it was known as Walsingham House, from the Walsingham area in which it stood. The property was owned by Samuel Trott when Tom Moore, the Irish poet, came to Bermuda in 1804 as Registrar of the Court of Vice-Admiralty. It was here that his friendship with Nea Tucker began and where he wrote many of his well known works.

The calabash tree to which Tom Moore makes frequent reference in his songs and poems still exists and is some 200 yards from the Tavern.

This beautiful 17th Century building is in its original state. Perhaps most beautiful are the casement windows and dining room fireplace. The fireplace was considered to be so unusual that it was reconstructed in England for the Wembley (London) Exhibition in 1925.

The house became a Tavern over 100 years ago and the records show that more than 3 million people have wined and dined within these old walls since then.

It is of interest to note that among our many famous visitors, His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, lunched at Tom Moore's Tavern on the 21st of October, 1970.

Walsingham House was featured in an article on Bermuda in Harper's Weekly of October, 1873 which read as follows...

"Walsingham House was for a year the residence of Thomas Moore, the poet. It is a quaint old gabled edifice, standing alone, buried in the dark cedar woods, washed on one side by the sea, and on the other by a tiny salt lake set in a bed of rock. The surface is littered with the dead leaves of mangroves, which spring out of it on their arching stems. The cedars, dead and silvered, or green and living, rise from an impenetrable tangle of fern and brush-wood. How they grow at all is a wonder, for there is no soil, only rock, jagged and sharp as the teeth of a saw. Innumerable fish, rainbow-tinted, dart through the dark waters, and here and there a turtle floats leisurely along. Hard by is the well-known "calabash" to which the poet refers in the verse beginning,

"Twas thus, by the shade of the calabash tree."

Moore was enthusiastic about the beauties of Bermuda. In one of his poems he wrote:

"The morn was lovely, every wave was still,

When the first perfume of a cedar hill

Sweetly awakened us, and with smiling charms

The fairy harbor wooed us to her arms.

Gently we stole before the languid wind,

Through plantain shades that like an awning twined,

While far reflected, o'er the wave serene,

Each wooded island sheds so soft a green

That the enamoured keel, with whispering play,

Through liquid herbage seemed to steal its way."