PB 24 Mynydd Dinas

The views from the summit of Mynydd Dinas can be magnificent. On an exceptionally clear day it is even possible to make out the Lleyn peninsula to the north and even the Wicklow Hills of Ireland.

Closer to home, on the hill’s modest summit you are about 300m (984ft) above sea level and have an excellent vantage point from which to view the series of headlands that are a feature of Pembrokeshire’s north coast.

Just below Mynydd Dinas is the promontory known as Dinas Island. It isn’t an island at all; in fact it is connected to the line of the coast by a low lying marsh.

The Preseli Hills are the highest in Pembrokeshire and are composed of Ordovician shale and mudstone that has been compressed to form tough slate. In places there are also fragments of rhyolite and dolerite, the famous bluestone that forms the inner ring of Stonehenge.

At Dinas the Preselis seem to rise straight out of the sea and from the little village of Dinas Cross you are quickly onto open moorland. Much of the Preselis upland is boggy and the soils acidic, allowing plants like fir clubmoss, liverwort, ferns and orchids to thrive. In late summer the warm pink of the heather adds rich colour to the landscape.

As you walk look out for buzzards and ravens while you may spot a curlew, a wading bird with a long down-curved beak that feeds on wet moorland.

The Preseli moorlands are largely common grazing land. Large numbers of sheep graze the hills along with hardy Preseli ponies.

The hills can seem very lonely today but they are rich in clues to the presence of earlier generations. Close to the route at Trellwyn is Parc Meirw, the Field of the Dead, a group of standing stones that are thought to date from the Bronze Age.