Mynydd Nodol is a 539m high

hill A hill is a landform that extends above the surrounding terrain. It often has a distinct summit, and is usually applied to peaks which are above elevation compared to the relative landmass, though not as prominent as Mountain, mountains. Hills ...

Snowdonia National Park Snowdonia, or Eryri (), is a mountainous region and National parks of the United Kingdom, national park in North Wales. It contains all 15 mountains in Wales Welsh 3000s, over 3000 feet high, including the country's highest, Snowdon (), which i ...

and lying within the

community A community is a social unit (a group of people) with a shared socially-significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given g ...

Llanycil Llanycil is a Community (Wales), community in the county of Gwynedd, Wales, near Bala, Gwynedd, Bala; it is 99.9 miles (160.7 km) from Cardiff and 176.2 miles (283.6 km) from London. In 2011 the population of Llanycil was 416, with 80. ...

in the county of

Gwynedd Gwynedd () is a county in the north-west of Wales. It borders Anglesey across the Menai Strait to the north, Conwy, Denbighshire, and Powys to the east, Ceredigion over the Dyfi estuary to the south, and the Irish Sea to the west. The ci ...

in North

Wales Wales ( ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by the Irish Sea to the north and west, England to the England–Wales border, east, the Bristol Channel to the south, and the Celtic ...

. It rises above the southern shores of the reservoir

Llyn Celyn Llyn Celyn () is a reservoir constructed between 1960 and 1965 including the highly controversial Tryweryn flooding in the valley of the River Afon Tryweryn, Tryweryn in Gwynedd, Wales. This included the forcible removal of the Capel Celyn vil ...

about 4 km northeast of its higher neighbour

Arenig Fawr is a mountain in Snowdonia, North Wales, close to Llyn Celyn reservoir, alongside the A4212 road, A4212 between Trawsfynydd and Bala, Gwynedd, Bala. Location Arenig Fawr is the highest member of the Arenigs, Arenig range, with , a smaller nei ...

. Mynydd Nodol forms the backdrop in views from the A4212 car park by the dam. The hill throws down a broad shoulder to the east.

Geology

The hill is formed from the acid ash-flow

tuff Tuff is a type of rock made of volcanic ash ejected from a vent during a volcanic eruption. Following ejection and deposition, the ash is lithified into a solid rock. Rock that contains greater than 75% ash is considered tuff, while rock co ...

s of the Llyn Conwy Formation of the

Ordovician The Ordovician ( ) is a geologic period and System (geology), system, the second of six periods of the Paleozoic Era (geology), Era, and the second of twelve periods of the Phanerozoic Eon (geology), Eon. The Ordovician spans 41.6 million years f ...

age Aran Volcanic Group. These same erosion-resistant

volcanic A volcano is commonly defined as a vent or fissure in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. On Earth, volcanoes are most often fo ...

rocks are responsible for several other hills and mountains in the area.

Mudstone Mudstone, a type of mudrock, is a fine-grained sedimentary rock whose original constituents were clays or muds. Mudstone is distinguished from ''shale'' by its lack of fissility.Blatt, H., and R.J. Tracy, 1996, ''Petrology.'' New York, New York, ...

s of the overlying Nant Hir Formation occur beneath the eastern slopes of the hill. Several

intrusion In geology, an igneous intrusion (or intrusive body or simply intrusion) is a body of intrusive igneous rock that forms by crystallization of magma slowly cooling below the surface of the Earth. Intrusions have a wide variety of forms and com ...

s of quartz-latite outcrop around the lower northern and western slopes of Mynydd Nodol though both these and the Nant Hir mudstones are partly obscured by

glacial till image:Geschiebemergel.JPG, Closeup of glacial till. Note that the larger grains (pebbles and gravel) in the till are completely surrounded by the matrix of finer material (silt and sand), and this characteristic, known as ''matrix support'', is d ...

which mantles the lower ground. There are abandoned

manganese Manganese is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Mn and atomic number 25. It is a hard, brittle, silvery metal, often found in minerals in combination with iron. Manganese was first isolated in the 1770s. It is a transition m ...

mining levels and tips on the hill's northern and western flanks, recorded as being worked intermittently from 1867 for around 40 years.

Access

Almost the entire hill is mapped as

open country "Open Country" is a designation used for some access land in England and Wales. It was first defined under the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 (and extended by the Countryside Act 1968), and was land over which an appropr ...

under the

Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (c. 37), also known as the CRoW Act and "Right to Roam" Act, is a United Kingdom Act of Parliament affecting England and Wales which came into force on 30 November 2000. Right to roam The Act impleme ...

thereby giving members of the public the right to walk across it more or less freely. An unfenced minor public road running northwest from

Bala Bala may refer to: Films * ''Bala'' (1976 film), an English-language dance documentary * ''Bala'' (2002 film), a Tamil-language action film * ''Bala'' (2019 film), a Hindi-language black comedy Life forms *Bala shark (''Balantiocheilos melano ...

fringes the southwestern edge of the hill.Ordnance Survey Explorer map OL18 Harlech, Porthmadog & Bala/Y Bala''

References

External links

images of Mynydd Nodol and area on Geograph website
{{coord, 52.9391, N, 3.6903, W, type:landmark_region:GB, display=title Llanycil Mountains and hills of Gwynedd Mountains and hills of Snowdonia Marilyns of Wales