Caernarfon

An Inn Inside the Walls

Floorboards at the Black Boy Inn yielded a child's shoe, clay-pipe fragments and gnawed animal bones. Tradition dates the inn to 1522, while the surviving load-bearing walls reach a metre and a half thick and were built in stages, probably in the 17th century. Three theories explain the name: a visiting black boy, a navigational buoy in the strait, or Charles II's Royalist nickname. Four exterior signs 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 inn is one of the few family-owned free houses left in the country, with an in-house Four & Six restaurant built around locally sourced Welsh ingredients. It is a traditional ale house, a fitting detail in a town that had around 37 pubs in the 19th century—roughly one for every 243 residents. 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

Several historic pubs remain. The Anglesey Arms stands against the town walls beside the castle, at the mouth of the Seiont, with outdoor seating along the sea wall and views across to Anglesey. Tafarn y Porth occupies a converted supermarket beside the walls, with a spacious partly covered courtyard and local Welsh ales. The Four Alls, on Hole in the Wall Street, has a beer garden, a log burner and Sunday lunches.

Bar Bach calls itself Wales's smallest bar, a narrower claim than smallest pub. Its entrance is on Greengate Street. Ship & Castle, Palace Vaults, Y Twthill (formerly Twthill Vaults) and Morgan Lloyd round out the town's pub list.

Palace Street carries much of the town's food scene. Y Wal serves chargrilled steaks from Llanfair Hall, dry-aged for a month, alongside pasta, risotto and pizza. Scoops serves ice cream and sweet and savoury Dutch pancakes. Caffi Maes cooks breakfasts fresh to order across three floors, with outdoor seating looking at the castle.

Cofi Culture and the Town Circuit

Palas Print, on Palace Street, is an independent bookshop selling Welsh- and English-language books "from Wales and the World," CDs and vinyl by Welsh musicians, mostly handmade local greetings cards and good coffee. Its service is bilingual. Around 86 percent of the town could speak Welsh at the 2001 census, and Cofi names both the people and the town's distinctive urban Welsh dialect, full of words used nowhere else. The derivation of Cofi is disputed: one account links it to cof, meaning memory, while a Welsh-language dictionary derives cofi from English cove.

The obvious walk is the walls themselves. The unbroken circuit is 734 metres of medieval stone with eight towers and two gatehouses, enclosing about ten acres and ranking among Europe's best-preserved walled circuits. Hole in the Wall Street and the quay give a sense of the original town. From the Slate Quay, walk along the water and cross the Aber Swing Bridge—Pont yr Aber—to Coed Helen on the far bank of the Seiont. For a longer outing, Lôn Eifion follows the former railway corridor south towards Bryncir as a traffic-free National Cycle Network trail.

The Maes, or Castle Square, is the town's centre and market square, with Saturday markets year-round and a Tuesday midweek market; Monday markets are listed before Christmas. In 2009 it became Wales's first "shared space" scheme, mixing pedestrians and cars without kerbs; the change was locally controversial. David Lloyd George's statue, erected in 1921, stands on the Maes. He was MP for the Caernarfon Boroughs for 55 years and Prime Minister for six, and he helped bring the 1911 investiture of the Prince of Wales to the castle.

Dock, Steam and Castle

Victoria Dock was built in 1868–74 for Scandinavian timber and reopened in 1997 as a marina. It is now Doc Fictoria, with waterfront cafés and the Galeri, a major arts and enterprise centre opened in 2005 with bass-baritone Bryn Terfel as patron. Terfel was born nearby and lives just outside town at Bontnewydd. Pleasure-boat cruises are a seasonal service along the strait.

Families and steam enthusiasts can take the Welsh Highland Railway from St Helen's Road beneath the castle walls. Britain's longest heritage railway runs 25 miles to Porthmadog, hauled by the world's most powerful narrow-gauge steam locomotives, climbing from sea level to more than 650 feet on Snowdon's flanks before descending through Beddgelert and the Aberglaslyn Pass. Onboard catering varies by service: Gold Class on named trains has at-seat waiter service, while other trains have different or no catering.

The castle deserves a proper look, not only because it is enormous. Edward I began it after conquering Gwynedd in 1283 on the site of a pre-existing Norman fortification; the Roman fort of Segontium lies a short distance away. Its design was deliberate. Polygonal towers and banded masonry echo the walls of Constantinople, an English king's imperial statement in a conquered country. The western Eagle Tower is the grandest: its three turrets once carried 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 first appears in the record three centuries later.

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, making it the longest-used Roman fort in Wales. Sir Mortimer Wheeler excavated a commander's house, a bathhouse and a temple to Mithras in the 1920s. The fort appears in the Mabinogion tale "The Dream of Macsen Wledig": the emperor dreams of a maiden and finds her at the fort at the mouth of the Seiont. She was Elen. St Peblig's at Llanbeblig is named for her son, while St Mary's is built into the north-west corner of the town wall, using one of its towers as a bell tower—a garrison chapel begun around 1307 by Henry of Ellerton, who was then finishing the castle.

Jan Morris described Caernarfonshire as "the profoundly civilised society" in which she first ventured publicly as herself. That is a fair note to end on: beneath the castle's imperial grandeur, Caernarfon is quiet, self-possessed and entirely its own. On market day the square fills, boats come and go from the quay, and someone has coffee overlooking the castle, speaking Welsh, calling themselves a Cofi and making no fuss about any of it.