A Farmer Was Digging in His Field—and Accidentally Discovered an Ancient Roman Fort
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An Oxford scholar discovered an ancient Roman fort in his hometown in Wales.
The finding could rewrite the known history of the Romans and the Celts in the region.
Satellite imagery originally pushed the scholar to the site, only to find a piece of roofing slate poking out of a field.
A farmer in Wales had a field that just made life too difficult. He was continually hitting slate and stone. It turns out, there was a good reason for all the struggle: a buried Roman fort.
Mark Merrony of Wolfson College, Oxford, discovered pieces of the fort, which he claims is from the first to third century (thanks to a little bit of homegrown knowledge). The find could rewrite our understanding of the state of relations between the Romans and the Celts of the time.
“It is a humongous fort,” Merrony told The Guardian, “an incredible find of national importance.” Believed to be five to seven acres in size—plenty big enough to house 500 soldiers—the fort find came as a double surprise.
“It is a rare discovery in this part of the world,” Merrony wrote on a GoFundMe webpage trying to raise money to professionally investigate the discovery further, adding it is “significant to our current understanding of the Romans in this region of Britain.”
The Romans and Celts were believed to have been friendly, in part because of the lack of Roman forts discovered in Wales. But that may simply be from a dearth of searching. “I now don’t think they were pro-Roman at all,” he said, “but that the Romans were hitting the area with an iron fist.”
The fort has been dated to around the time that the Celtic Demetae tribe occupied southwest Wales. “This is a pretty hardcore military site,” Merrony told the BBC. If archaeologists are afforded the resources, Merrony believes more Roman forts will pop up throughout Wales.
“I wasn’t expecting to find something like this,” Merrony told the BBC, “it’s one thing finding a villa or a road, but to find a military site like this is [on] a very different scale altogether really.”
A local of the area, the long, straight road had always lured Merrony into wondering if it was a Roman road. He investigated satellite imagery and set his sights on a large, overgrown field to see if he could find further evidence of Roman occupation. When he went to the field, he stumbled upon a triangular piece of Roman roofing slate. “Flip it upside down and you can see underneath a diagonal line where it was grooved to fit into the one that was underneath it,” he told The Guardian. “It’s a real beauty.”
When Merrony approached the farmer about the potential of the fort, the farmer said he’d been hitting slate and stone for years. “That suggests there’s a lot of material under the ground,” Merrony said. “That’s because there’s obviously several collapsed buildings here. The slates are left, the timbers have rotted.”
Merrony wrote that the fort occupied a strategic location—it would have had a view overlooking a river valley, nearby springs to feed water to the site, and a slope that put it in an advantageous position.
The well-preserved auxiliary fort was likely built by soldiers attached to the Second Augustan Legion at Caerleon in Gwent, Merrony noted, adding that it is a “remarkable stroke of luck” that the site was left largely untouched by farming.
With the hallmarks of the classic Roman fort in the “playing card” style (with rounded corners, banks, and ditches) and a nearby Roman road having now both been discovered, there may be plenty more Roman era finds to add to the mix.
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