The dislocation structures appearing in highly mis-oriented soft/hard grain pairs in near-alphatitanium alloy Ti6242Si were examined with and without the application of load holds (dwell)during fatigue. Dislocation pile-up in a soft grain resulted in internal stresses in an adjacent hardgrain which could be relaxed by dislocation multiplication at localised Frank–Read sources, aprocess assisted by the provision of a relaxation time during a load hold. The rate of this processis suggested to be controlled by⟨𝑐+𝑎⟩pyramidal cross-slip and⟨𝑎⟩basal junction formation.A high density of⟨𝑎⟩prism pile-ups was observed with dual slip on two prism planes, togetherwith edge dislocations on the third prism plane in the soft grain of a highly mis-oriented grainpair, increasing the pile-up stress. The stress concentration developed by such pile-ups is foundto be higher in dwell fatigue (single-ended pile-ups) than in LCF (double ended). Analyticalmodelling shows that the maximum normal stress produced on the hard grain in dwell fatigueby this pile-up would be near-basal,≈ 2.5◦to (0002). This provides support for the dominanthypothesis for the rationalisation of dwell fatigue crack nucleation in Ti alloys, which derivesfrom the Stroh pile-up model, and elaboration of the underlying dislocation phenomena thatresult from load shedding and lead to basal faceting.