The name has been a small ongoing controversy. The earliest written reference appears in a Caernarfon deed of sale from 1717, recording a property in 'Street Y Black Boy'. From there, three explanations compete. One traces it to a black buoy that once marked the nearby harbour entrance, a piece of port slang gradually fused into a place name. A second points to Charles II, nicknamed 'Black Boy' by his mother Henrietta Maria of France for his dark hair and complexion, and to the Royalists who reportedly met here in secret during the Civil War. A third blames it on simple racial caricature in an age that traded freely in such images. The pub's owners have stuck with the historic name through periodic calls to change it. Between 1828 and a later restoration the sign actually came down twice - first to become the King's Arms, then the Fleur de Lys - before the old name returned with a change of ownership.

The Black Boy sits a few hundred yards from Caernarfon Castle, tucked just behind the town walls Edward I raised between 1283 and 1285. The North Gate archway at the end of the street is newer than it looks - it was punched through the medieval fabric in the 1820s to ease horse traffic in and out of the old quarter. The inn itself is a rare survival: a Grade II listed 17th-century building that still retains some original interior detail, all dark beams and uneven plaster, set into a town that has otherwise been heavily rebuilt around it. It is one of the few free houses in the United Kingdom still owned by an independent family business, untied to any major brewery.

Like most very old pubs, the Black Boy collects stories. The most persistent is the ghost of a nun said to drift through the rooms on her way to a vanished nunnery that once stood at the rear of the building. There is also a real find. In 1990 an archaeological dig alongside the inn turned up the skeleton of an elderly woman, buried without ceremony, believed to have been laid there to spare her family the cost of a funeral. She had no marker, no shroud the diggers could detect, no companions. The poverty of that burial is its own ghost story - the kind of detail a five-hundred-year-old building accumulates in its yard without anyone meaning to.

The modern Black Boy takes its beer seriously. It won the Cask Marque award for the quality of its cask ales in both 2008 and 2009, and appeared in the 2010 Good Beer Guide published by CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale. The food leans Welsh - lamb cawl, Anglesey crab when it is in season, locally smoked salmon - and the front bar fills up most evenings with a mix of regulars speaking Welsh and visitors trying to decode the bilingual menu. The novelty is not the beer or the food. It is the simple fact that someone has been doing more or less this exact thing on this exact spot, with intermittent name changes and renovations, since the reign of Henry VIII.