Caernarfon

An Inn Inside the Walls

When they lifted the dining-room floorboards at the Black Boy Inn, they found a child's shoe, some clay-pipe fragments, and a few gnawed animal bones. The inn has been on Northgate Street since the 17th century, possibly since 1522 if you believe the older date, and its load-bearing walls run up to a metre and a half thick. Nobody is entirely sure where the name comes from. There are three theories: a black boy who once visited, a navigational buoy out in the strait, or the nickname of Charles II, whom local Royalists supposedly toasted here in secret. The inn hedges its bets. Its four exterior signs each show a black buoy on one side and a black boy on the other.

You are inside the walls of Caernarfon, a walled town on the southern shore of the Menai Strait where the River Seiont opens into the sea. Anglesey sits across the water. To the south and east the ground climbs quickly into Eryri, and Yr Wyddfa fills the skyline inland. The thing your eye goes to first, though, is the castle: honey-and-grey banded towers rising straight out of the waterfront, with a grey wall-circuit ringing the old town behind it. Locals are called Cofis, and this is one of the most Welsh-speaking towns in Wales.

The Black Boy is one of the few family-owned free houses left in the country, and it runs an in-house restaurant it calls the Four & Six, built around locally sourced Welsh ingredients. It is a proper old ale house, which in Caernarfon puts it in company. In the 19th century the town had around 37 pubs, roughly one for every 243 residents. This did not go unnoticed. In one year before 1909, 127 people were punished for drunkenness, and in July 1909 the magistrates stripped ten Caernarfonshire pubs of their licences in a single crackdown.

Pubs and Palace Street

A good number survive. The Anglesey Arms is built up against the town walls next to the castle, at the mouth of the Seiont, with a lot of outdoor seating along the sea wall and usually at least three ales on. It is the place to sit and look across to Anglesey. Tafarn y Porth is the Wetherspoon, occupying a converted supermarket beside the walls, with a spacious partly covered courtyard and a range that often runs to local Welsh ales. The Four Alls, on Hole in the Wall Street, has a beer garden, a log burner, and Sunday lunches.

And then there is Bar Bach, which claims to be the smallest bar in Wales. It is careful about this. It does not say smallest pub, only smallest bar, which is the sort of distinction you learn to make when you are very small. You reach it through a narrow entrance on Greengate Street, around the corner from Caffi Maes, which is the same business. Beyond these there are the Crown, the Ship & Castle, the Palace Vaults, Twthill Vaults, the Morgan Lloyd, the Pen Deitch, and the Castle Hotel, which is a lot of pubs for one small town but, historically speaking, restrained.

Palace Street runs through the walled town and it is where a lot of the eating happens. Y Wal, tucked within the walls, does chargrilled steaks from Llanfair Hall, dry-aged for a month, alongside pasta, risotto and pizza, with a lot of the lunch dishes coming in just over ten pounds. Osteria Caernarfon, on Hole in the Wall Street, is Tuscan, small, and well thought of, importing its cheese and salami from Florence and serving a Raghu made to the owner's grandmother's recipe. Becws Melys on Palace Street does cheesecakes, homemade burritos, Welsh rarebit and soup of the day. Palas Caffi, directly opposite the castle entrance, makes its own ice cream. Scoops, a few doors down, does ice cream and Dutch pancakes, sweet and savoury. Caffi Maes cooks its breakfasts fresh to order over three floors, with outdoor seating looking at the castle.

Cofi Culture and the Town Circuit

Palas Print, on Palace Street, is the independent bookshop, selling Welsh- and English-language books "from Wales and the World," along with CDs and vinyl by Welsh musicians, greetings cards that are mostly handmade locally, and good coffee. The service is bilingual, which in Caernarfon it would have to be. Around 86 percent of the town could speak Welsh at the 2001 census, and Cofi is not just what you call the people; it is the name of the town's own Welsh dialect, one of the few genuinely urban dialects in the language, stuffed with words used nowhere else. The word probably comes from cof, meaning memory.

The obvious walk is the walls themselves. The circuit is unbroken, 734 metres of medieval stone with eight towers and two gatehouses, enclosing about ten acres, and it is reckoned one of the best-preserved walled circuits in Europe. The archaeologists Oliver Creighton and Robert Higham call it "a remarkably intact walled circuit." Hole in the Wall Street and the quay give you the feel of the original town. From the Slate Quay you can walk along the water and cross the Aber Swing Bridge — Pont yr Aber — to Coed Helen on the far bank of the Seiont. For something longer, Lôn Eifion is a traffic-free trail running south out of town along the old Welsh Highland rail corridor toward Bryncir, part of the National Cycle Network.

The centre of things is the Maes, or Castle Square, where the Saturday market runs year-round and Mondays are added in summer. In 2009 it was redesigned at a cost of £2.4m as the first "shared space" scheme in Wales, mixing pedestrians and cars without kerbs, which was locally controversial and remains the sort of thing people have opinions about. David Lloyd George's statue, put up in 1921, stands on the Maes. He was MP for the Caernarfon Boroughs for 55 years and Prime Minister for six of them, and it was largely at his instigation that the 1911 investiture of the Prince of Wales was staged at the castle in the first place.

Dock, Steam and Castle

Down at the water, Victoria Dock was built in the 1868–74 for Scandinavian timber and reopened in 1997 as a marina. It is now Doc Fictoria, with waterfront cafés and the Galeri, a £7.5m arts and enterprise centre that opened in 2005 with the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel as its patron. Terfel was born nearby and lives just outside town at Bontnewydd. In season, pleasure boats run cruises from the Slate Quay along the strait.

If you have children, or simply like steam trains, the Welsh Highland Railway leaves from St Helen's Road, its trains departing from beneath the castle walls. It is Britain's longest heritage railway, 25 miles to Porthmadog, hauled by the most powerful narrow-gauge steam locomotives in the world, climbing from sea level to over 650 feet on the flanks of Snowdon before dropping down through Beddgelert and the Aberglaslyn Pass. Food is served to your seat. At Porthmadog it connects with the Ffestiniog Railway for another stretch of steam, if a full day of trains is your idea of a holiday.

The castle deserves a proper look, and not only because it is enormous. Edward I built it after conquering Gwynedd in 1283, on the site of a Roman fort, and everything about it was designed to say something. The towers are polygonal rather than round, and the masonry is banded in colours, both of which deliberately echo the walls of Constantinople — an English king announcing an empire to a conquered country. The Eagle Tower at the western corner is the grandest, its three turrets once crowned with carved stone eagles, now weathered down to lumps. Edward II was, by tradition, born here in 1284. The story that his father presented him to the Welsh as a prince who spoke no English is a good story, but it only appears in the record three centuries later, which is usually what happens to good stories.

Roman Roots and a Cofi Ending

The Romans were here first, and for far longer. Segontium sits on a hilltop about half a mile south-east of the walls, founded around AD 77 and garrisoned for over three hundred years, the longest-used Roman fort in Wales. Sir Mortimer Wheeler dug it in the 1920s and found a commander's house, a bathhouse and a temple to Mithras. The place also turns up in the Mabinogion: in "The Dream of Macsen Wledig," the Roman emperor dreams of a maiden and finds her, when he wakes and goes looking, at the fort at the mouth of the Seiont. She was called Elen, and one of the two grade I churches in town, St Peblig's out at Llanbeblig, is named for her son. The other, St Mary's, is built straight into the north-west corner of the town wall, using one of the wall's towers as its bell tower — a garrison chapel begun around 1307 by Henry of Ellerton, the man who was then finishing the castle.

The writer Jan Morris lived out in Caernarfonshire and once described it as "the profoundly civilised society" in which she first ventured publicly as herself. That is a fair note to end on, because for all the castle's shouting about empire, the town at its feet is quiet and self-possessed and entirely its own. On a Saturday the market fills the Maes, the boats come and go from the quay, and someone is having a coffee at Caffi Maes over three floors with the castle in the window, speaking Welsh, calling themselves a Cofi, and not making a fuss about any of it.