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 kilometres 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 of 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 lay 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 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 scepticism, but my heart and mind felt that I was........

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