A red dragon sculpture at Caerphilly Castle for St David's Day

© Sebastian Wasek/SIME/eStock Phot

Y Ddraig Goch (The Red Dragon). Celebrating St David’s Day in Wales

It was only in 1959 that the red dragon, shown against a green and white field, was adopted as the national flag of Wales. But the red dragon itself has existed in a variety of stories and images for centuries. The oldest recorded use of the dragon to represent Wales is from the Historia Brittonum, written around 829 AD. The ancient text tells the story of a red dragon, representing the Celts or Britons, battling and eventually defeating a white dragon, which stood for the Saxons. The same story is repeated in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, where the red dragon was a prophecy of the coming of King Arthur, whose father was named Uther Pendragon, which translates as 'Dragon's Head'. The beast in our photo, which is made of fibreglass, weighs one tonne and can blow smoke out of its flaring nostrils, landed on the banks of Caerphilly Castle – the largest castle in Wales – on St David's Day in 2016.