The meaning of Bodafon is obscure. Bod is a common Welsh placename element meaning 'dwelling.' Afon usually means 'river,' but the topography here rules that out - there is no river to live beside. The likely explanation is that afon is a corruption of an older personal name, A(e)ddan, so Mynydd Bodafon means 'the mountain of Aeddan's dwelling.' Whoever Aeddan was, he probably lived on this hill long enough for the name to outlast everything else about him. The name now refers both to the hill itself and to the wider geographical area surrounding it, within the Penrhoslligwy parish. The summit is modest in absolute terms - the highest point reaches about 178 metres above sea level - but its prominence over the surrounding flat landscape is striking. From the top, on a clear day, Snowdonia rises in the south and the Irish Sea opens to the north and east.

Mynydd Bodafon's habitat is heathland, shaped by centuries of light grazing and occasional fire. Different heathers cover the slopes, with two species of gorse, cotton grass, bog asphodel and tormentil scattered through. Adders bask in the warm grass on summer mornings; small lizards skitter across the bare patches between heather mounds. Stonechats perch on the gorse, chough wheel overhead, peregrines hunt the upper slopes and cuckoos call in spring - an old local song celebrates the cuckoo of Bodafon. In the lake, heron and coot patrol the shallows and water rail rasp from the reeds. A rare form of pillwort, a small aquatic fern, persists in the lake margins. Rabbits do most of the grazing now; sheep numbers are far lower than a century ago, and parts of the heath are reverting to pioneer woodland - young birch and hawthorn taking hold where the heather thins. Heath fires sweep across occasionally, often at the wrong time of year, which encourages bracken at the expense of more delicate species.

East of the lake, on the eastern flank of the hill, lies an Iron Age settlement known locally as Cytiau'r Gwyddelod - the Irishmen's huts. The name is misleading: the huts almost certainly weren't built by Irish settlers but by local British people during the Iron Age and Romano-British periods. 'Irishmen's huts' is a folk explanation applied retrospectively to ruins whose builders nobody remembered. The settlement consists of stone-walled circular and oval foundations - the bases of timber-roofed roundhouses where families lived two thousand years ago. Mynydd Bodafon also holds a place in older spiritual tradition; the article notes plainly that the hill has 'a special place in druidic and spiritual history,' though the specifics have not survived in print. What survives is the persistence of legend: the bottomless lake, the connection to Snowdonia, the way the hill catches the eye from any direction. People have been telling stories about this place for two and a half millennia.