Merthyr Town F.C.

Currently playing in National League North, Merthyr Town boast a beautiful badge that tells an incredible story – one of Roman forts, religious sacrifice and Industrial Revolution engineering brilliance. So, let's do this Welsh town the honour and #GetTheBadgeIn to see what we can find out.

The club itself was formed in 1908 and has always played in the English leagues, alongside larger Welsh clubs such as Cardiff, Swansea, Wrexham and Newport. They have competed in both English and Welsh cup competitions, with a highlight coming in 1987 when they won the Welsh Cup and qualified for the European Cup Winners' Cup. There they were drawn against Italian giants Atalanta and, remarkably, beat them in the first leg. Quite the scalp that few clubs outside the top two divisions of English football could ever boast. Remarkably, and wonderfully, they have played their entire history at the same venue – Penydarren Park. There is an image in the National Library of Wales of the team playing against my home team, Ipswich Town, in 1951. Note how the football shirts still looked rather like rugby jerseys, complete with their large collars.

The football stadium itself proved to be the key to unlocking one of the earliest chapters in the town's history. The site once housed a Roman fort. Contractors clearing the land to build the ground came across pottery fragments and brickwork, which soon revealed a substantial Roman site containing mosaics, a well and a bathhouse.

The Romans had built the fort during their campaigns against the local Welsh Silures tribe. This struggle featured clashes between the tribal leader and warrior Caratacus and the Roman governor of Britain, Publius Ostorius Scapula. Scapula had his work cut out trying to subdue an island of tribes that largely resented their new occupiers. He strengthened Roman authority through centres such as Colchester and St Albans in a bid to extend Roman control across Britain.

The Iceni in East Anglia (of Boudicca fame) launched several attacks on Roman forces, while in Wales it was Caratacus who won a number of notable victories and frustrated Roman advances through guerrilla-style warfare, retreating into the Welsh hills before appearing elsewhere to strike again. Eventually, however, the sheer might and persistence of Rome prevailed. Caratacus was captured and the region settled into relative calm. By this point, however, Roman power was beginning to wane and imperial troops were gradually withdrawing. Not before, though, they had introduced Christianity to the local population – a development that would shape the town's future.

One thing I was not especially aware of, perhaps because I grew up on the east coast, was that after the Romans left, the power vacuum in Wales and western England led to the phenomenon of Irish raiders attacking – and sometimes settling – across the region, just as the Germanic Saxons were doing on the opposite side of Britain.

But it was the presence of Christianity that would result in the event for which the town would become most famous – and from which it would take both its name and football crest.

The clue to the town's name lies in those early Christian roots. In Welsh, the word *merthyr* means "martyr" – someone who dies for their faith. Merthyr Tydfil therefore translates roughly as "The Martyrdom of Tydfil", making it one of the few towns in Britain named directly after a religious sacrifice.

Tydfil herself was a legendary Welsh saint who is said to have lived during those turbulent years after Roman rule collapsed. According to tradition, she was one of the twenty-four children of Brychan, King of Brycheiniog. Twenty-four children. Poor guy.

The story goes that around the year 480, Tydfil and her brother Rhun were killed near the site of the modern town, either by local pagan Welsh groups or by Anglo-Saxon raiders pushing westwards into Britain. In death, Tydfil became a Christian martyr and the settlement that grew around her shrine took her name. The parish church of St Tydfil still stands in the town today and is believed to be where she is buried.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the image that adorns the crest of Merthyr Town F.C.

We could stop the story there, but then we'd be missing out on one of the town's most remarkable stories and contributions to the world: iron.

Merthyr was blessed with a geographical jackpot. Within a relatively small area sat huge reserves of iron ore, coal and limestone – the three key ingredients needed to produce iron on an industrial scale. Add fast-flowing rivers for power, vast forests for timber and a valley that naturally connected the area to the coast, and you had all the ingredients for this one-time Roman fort and settlement, known primarily for its church, to become a centre of the Industrial Revolution.

From the mid-eighteenth century, entrepreneurs began to realise the potential hidden beneath the Welsh hills. What followed was one of the most extraordinary periods of industrial growth anywhere in Britain. Four giant ironworks emerged: Dowlais, Cyfarthfa, Plymouth and Penydarren. By the early nineteenth century they were producing iron on a scale almost unimaginable at the time.

At its peak, Merthyr Tydfil was not simply an important industrial town – it was the iron capital of the world. Tens of thousands of workers poured into the valley and the skyline became dominated by furnaces, chimneys and rolling mills. Thomas Carlyle visited in 1850 and described the scene as resembling a vision of Hell itself, with workers labouring amidst smoke, fire and dirt.

Yet alongside the grime came innovation. The need to move iron from the valley to the sea led to the construction of the Glamorganshire Canal and later a web of railways that threaded their way through some of the most difficult terrain in Britain. Then, in 1804, engineer Richard Trevithick successfully ran the world's first steam locomotive on rails. His machine hauled iron, wagons and passengers almost ten miles along the Merthyr Tramroad.

It was slow and the locomotive was unreliable, but none of that really matters. For a few hours on a February day in South Wales, the future arrived.

The railways that would reshape Britain, Europe and eventually the world can trace their ancestry back to Merthyr Tydfil.

The scale of production was astonishing. In 1844 alone, one Merthyr ironworks exported around 50,000 tons of railway rails to Russia. Those rails stretched eastwards across the vast Russian Empire towards Siberia. Merthyr iron was helping to build the infrastructure of nations thousands of miles away. The town's influence had become global.

And nowhere demonstrates that influence better than a city now at the centre of modern headlines – Donetsk, Ukraine.

In 1869, a Welsh industrialist named John Hughes left Merthyr and travelled to the coalfields of what was then the Russian Empire. What he found reminded him of South Wales: rich seams of coal, abundant iron ore and huge industrial potential. Hughes brought Welsh engineers, miners and ironworkers with him and founded a new ironworks and settlement. The town that grew around it became known as Hughesovka – literally "Hughes's Town". Over time, the name evolved into Donetsk (you can see the ironworks in the image - before the Russians destroyed it).

The industrial community that grew around Hughes's settlement would eventually give rise to one of Ukraine's most famous football clubs – FC Shakhtar Donetsk. Shakhtar, appropriately enough, means "coal miner".

So the story of Merthyr does not end in South Wales. The expertise developed in its furnaces helped build an industrial city more than 2,000 miles away on the edge of the Eurasian steppe. Today, Donetsk is known around the world for very different reasons, but its origins lie, surprisingly, in the ironworks, engineers and workers of Merthyr Tydfil.

Not bad for a football club badge featuring a fifth-century martyr.