THE DRAGON

Exactly what our dragon will look like when he emerges from his cave of limewash is open to speculation. The dragon image opposite - a slimmer beast than ours? - is used with permission from the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. This classic tableau, from Barclay's Life of St George, mirrors many of the expected elements in our own painting. Such a scene has been noted on the walls of over seventy English churches, but ours is only the third to be discovered here in Wales.

What we must not do is to confuse the dragon here with Y Ddraig Goch - the Red Dragon of Wales. Nor should our dragon be taken as Henry VII's symbolic dragon, a beast who in fact survived on the royal coat of arms until replaced by the Scottish Unicorn under the Stuart kings.

Though the dragon has many layers of meaning, our beast is essentially the symbol of evil, the metaphor behind the George & Dragon saga. Our dragon's wide jaws indeed seem to show a similarity with the depiction of Hell's Mouth as seen in many mural paintings of the 15th century.