Black Boy Inn, Caernarfon

The claim

Inside Caernarfon's medieval town walls, a stone's throw from the castle, the Black Boy claims a 1522 origin, though its fabric is 17th century. Ship's timbers, low beams and fireside seats fill the bar. Restoration turned up clay pipes and a child's shoe, and the inn has spread into neighbouring buildings to offer dozens of rooms.

What the records show

Cadw's listing, number 3905, describes a seventeenth-century house built in several phases, all probably of that century, with the windows altered in the nineteenth and replaced with leaded lights about 1900, and lists it as a rare surviving seventeenth-century building inside the walled town. Nothing in it reaches 1522, so the inn's claim runs about a century ahead of its fabric; the earliest record cited for the name is a 1717 deed to 'Street y Black Boy'. CAMRA gives the interior one star on its national inventory — special national historic interest — for two bars barely altered since the renovation of 1954, when the middle room, then a shop, became the lounge it still is. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales holds the house in the national record of buildings as number 26029, an inn of the post-medieval period on Northgate Street, and that record is worth reading for what it is and is not. Its description is the listing's own text, and it names the register as its source, dated June 2007, so it is Cadw restated rather than a second opinion on the date. What it adds is a citation: the Commission's own inventory of the ancient monuments in Caernarvonshire, volume two, published in 1960, describes the building at pages 156 and following with a drawing. The house was therefore surveyed and published by the Commission more than twenty years before it was listed in 1983, and we have not read that volume. The register's description repays quoting for the drinker rather than the dater: the main doorway leads into an original through passage with a round-headed niche on the right and a seventeenth-century round-headed doorway beyond it, the lower storey has cross-beams with run-out stops, a right-hand room has a fireplace with a timber lintel, and collar-beam roof trusses survive over the main range and the rear wings. Still nothing that reaches 1522.

Dated evidence for Black Boy Inn, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1522	Claimed founding	The pub
1717	First record of a drinking house here	Cadw

What to look for inside

Street's Welsh name 'Stryd Pedwar a Chwech' (Four-and-Six Street) linked to sailors' lodging
1717 deed mentions 'Street y Black Boy'
One star on CAMRA's national inventory of historic pub interiors
Two bars barely altered since the renovation of 1954

Visiting

Black Boy Inn is in Caernarfon, Wales, at Northgate Street, Caernarfon LL55 1RW. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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