King Vortigern, unable to build a tower on the hill of Dinas Emrys and wishing to offer a human sacrifice on the spot, learns from the young Ambrosius Aurelianus, who is endowed with supernatural powers, that the tower cannot be…

This legendary story recurs in one form or another, invariably linking the hill of Dinas Emrys, which really does exist in north-west Wales, with dragons and a wizard. In some legends Merlin hid his treasures in this hill. Elsewhere it is said that beneath the hill lay a burial ground of slain dragons.

One way or another, the dragons symbolise the two forces contending on the island at that time: the Romano-British and the Saxons, or the Celts and the Normans. The legend of the red dragon itself belongs to the cycle of Merlin's prophecies. And one dragon, invariably the more ancient, which came to Britain first, is obliged to struggle for supremacy with the other, the newcomer.

The sounds of the dragons' battle have been heard since the beginning of our era, when King Lludd, troubled by the noise of the subterranean combat, learned that the cry rising from under the earth came from the dragon of the Britons, which was being defeated by a foreign dragon.

Illustration from a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Historia Regum Britanniae