Calon gref, calon haearn/Strong heart, iron heart

Image: © A J Paxton Taken: 6 Aug 2024

This sculpture by David Appleyard was installed in Penderyn Square in Merthyr Tydfil in 2017. It honours Richard Lewis, known as Dic Penderyn, who was hanged in Cardiff on the 13th August 1831, for his part in the Chartist Rising in Merthyr. Penderyn was convicted of stabbing and wounding a soldier with a bayonet, on very shaky evidence, and came to be considered a martyr by the working people of the town and of Wales generally. The heart is made from steel derived from iron from the Cyfarthfa ironworks in the town; cuts to the wages of the already hard-pressed workers at Cyfarthfa were among the sparks that ignited the uprising. Before the heart are four sandstone slabs, letter-carved by John Neilsen with a poem commissioned from Gillian Clarke: The Rising Bearing their Welsh, their hunger, cold, they trudged the roads from Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire, the lonely upland farms, to Merthyr and a dream of gold. Ironstone miners, puddlers. Their hearts of iron made their masters rich, Merthyr our biggest town, twenty-thousand by eighteen thirty one, that blazing day a working class was born. They gathered beneath the peaks of Pen-y-Fan, Corn Ddu, Cribyn, and soldiers shot them down. Lament injustice, slaughter, the good man hanged as a warning: Dic Penderyn. Yn gweithio ym mwyngloddiau’r dwyrain, ifanc, dewr, Dic Penderyn, calon gref, calon haearn, dieuog i’r crocbren. The final stanza is an englyn, a traditional Welsh poetic form, and speaks of Penderyn's "strong heart, iron heart, innocent to the gallows." For the inscriptions, see Image] and Image See also David Appleyard's site https://www.davidappleyard.co.uk/merthyr-heart , also Wikipedia on Penderyn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dic_Penderyn and on the Merthyr Rising https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merthyr_Rising .

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