This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: My recent discovery of a Roman fort and its extraordinary connection with medieval folklore was the fruition of many hours of painstaking research. This all began in 2002 when I discovered or, more accurately, rediscovered a Roman villa some 30 kilometers (19 miles) to the west of Wales.
The site was first identified in the early 19th century by Richard Fenton, a local antiquarian. For several reasons, his reliability has been questioned, but mostly because the perception that the Romans did not reach west Wales was rife in the Regency period and persists to this day. When my team and I were digging the villa, a local volunteer asked what a Roman site of this status was doing in the middle of nowhere.
This was a good question, and I did not know the answer. However, the archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler dug a similar site on the same latitude in 1922, and I reasoned that both sites could lie close to a Roman road. This began a quest to trace a network of routes through west Wales.
A stretch of Roman road was in fact identified by Fenton in the vale of Whitland. This was excavated in 1995, in advance of the construction of a bypass, but I felt that there was more of a network to be discovered. I made a breakthrough in 2022.
Several other Romano-British sites have been discovered since Wheeler's day, including a fort at Wiston near Haverfordwest in 2012–2013, and several villas. Like Fenton, my observations have attracted a good deal of skepticism, but my heart and mind felt that I was making considerable progress tracing the Roman road network from Pembrokeshire east into Carmarthenshire. My theory received a boost in 2024 with the observation of earthworks suggestive of a Roman auxiliary fort adjacent to an almost certain Roman road near Crymych in north Pembrokeshire.
The earthworks had a characteristic playing-card shape like auxiliary forts and were about three hectares (7.4 acres) in area, which is typical for this type of military installation. One corner has been destroyed by the construction of a post-medieval settlement (the village of Crymych), which is still inhabited today. The south of the enclosure is intersected by a leat (aqueduct) which enters the site through a masonry channel.
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