another go at posting a picture

[learnsslowly]

This time I'll try without a cut.

Comments

[heliopausa]

Triumph! :) Which castle, where?

[learnsslowly]

Dinas Bran in the Dee valley - not that far from Llangollen. As close as I come to having an ancestral area, I think.

You might be most likely to have come across mention Llangollen with reference to the international Eisteddfod.

[heliopausa]

No, I know it from the Ladies of Llangollen. :) Is Bran a personal name? And if so,does Dinas mean fortress,or similar?

[learnsslowly]

There are various theories. But for the fact that I was replying to your comment that had already referred to is as a castle, I would have probably called it Castell Dinas Bran. So in that context, Castell is the word that means castle, but Dinas seems also to have been around since the iron age and seems a word attached to lots of forts so probably can be translated as fortress or citadel. Bran could be a personal name - either of a mythological character or a real person of that name, but it could also imply crows or ravens. So you might think of it as the citadel of the crows.

I'm not a Welsh first Language speaker - in fact I have very little Welsh at all, so you might get a different set of opinions from someone who does.

There is also a Ysgol Dinas Bran. Naming a school after a local place name is quite usual in both England and Wales.

So I'd use the word Castell if I wanted to be precise about it being the actual castell rather than the school or just the approximate site and perhaps call it Dinas Bran otherwise.

[jenn_calaelen]

Lovely picture (and well done for figuring out how to get lj to include it - it always seems to be far more complicated that it should)