Dinas Dinlle is a Iron Age hillfort that sits on the western coastline of Gwynedd in North West Wales, just below the latitude of southern Ynys Mon, or Anglesey. It is 5 miles south of Caernarfon, indeed not far from the airfield for that area.

Again for these forts the design fits into the natural geography, using it's advantages. 

It sits on a  hillock that overlooks the beach, to the west, and the coastal plain to the east, north and south, with the backdrop of the mountains of Snowdonia to the east, and the peaks of the Lleyn peninsula to the south  It is very likely that the sea and beach was further away in Iron Age age, and even more recent times, but that coastal erosion has pushed closer to here overtime. This is not always the case, as at the Medieval site of Harlech castle, the tides and sands have conspired to push  the coast further out, so a castle that was by the sea, is now quite a walk from the sea behind the dunes. 

Sadly for us, and for  archaeologists and historians the  sea is encroaching evermore, and it possible this site will end up like the Black Rocks of Castel Tremlyd some day. 

To go there, there is a car park for the beach, and this is straight by the hillfort. Indeed from it, you walk past the information board, and rise the 30 metres up some steps to see the ramparts that encircle the fort.

The fort sited here has double ramparts, spanning 150 by 110 metres. It in finds includes Roman coins from the 3rd Century, and interestingly from later years it had a World War Two observation trench dug on it to protect the near airfield maybe. Showing a fine site can still have uses militarily centuries apart. 

Today the fort is named as Dinas means city in Welsh, or a settlement in more olden times, (Words in all languages can have quite a loose definition) and the rest is after a figure from the Mabinogion. Which was a collated work of the medieval myths of Wales, which I talk of later. He is Lleu, or Lleu Llaw Gyffes, who it talks of having supposedly magical conditional invulnerability, and sleight of hand, of turning into an eagle and all sorts of things. That figure is supposedly based on a Pre-Christian, Celtic Dark Ages figure, likely known as Lugh in Ireland, and Lugus in Gaul, so maybe it is not much of a jump from then to say the fort had a similar name in my story’s times. This website was written in October 2020, and I can tell you that you need my permission to use these pics, as they are mine, but you can probably take as good or better ones yourself, for your own use. Anyway they are of the site, all of them from north to south, one of them on it's edge. In them you can see the peaks of the Lleyn, and the peak on the left includes one where Tre'r Ceiri is, some of the other peaks have forts on them as well. 

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It sits near to Llandwrog as well as it's airfield. Dinas crops up in a few Welsh hillfort names,  like Dinas Emrys, and Dinas Bran, and further afield even Castle an Dinas in Cornwall. More so as I say in Wales, such as Dinas near Melin Y Wig, and there are more examples as well.