The Hero of Waterloo sits on the corner of Lower Fort and Windmill streets in Millers Point — Rocks-adjacent in the tourist brochure, Millers Point on the heritage sheet. Scottish stonemason George Paton (not “Pato”, not Payten) raised the sandstone house in 1843–44 and took the first publican’s licence on 30 June 1845. He had already been on the Garrison Church job up the hill; the same chisel language shows in both buildings.
Whalers, sealers and garrison traffic were the early custom. The trapdoor-and-smugglers’-tunnel yarns are part of the pub’s self-mythology — fun on a ghost tour, soft in a history note. What you can lean on is the fabric: three storeys of local sandstone, an early continuous licence story, and a State Heritage listing that treats the Hero as one of Sydney’s oldest surviving hotels.
Keep the live atmosphere (hand-cut stone, heavy timber, a schooner in the front bar). Fix the builder’s name and the 1845 licence date on paste; file the tunnel under lore unless a measured survey says otherwise.