The stunning beauty of Preseli Hills and the wilderness surrounding it has attracted visitors to North Pembrokeshire in Wales. An archaeologist has now found evidence that even the Romans were drawn to the area, with the discovery of an ancient road showing that they traveled further west through Britain than previously thought.
Dr Mark Merrony, a Roman specialist, tutor at Oxford University and a “native of Pembrokeshire”, said the road had been completely lost. “This is just extraordinary. I’m amazed,” he said.
“I think they’re going crazy in Wales because they’re pushing the Roman presence in Pembrokeshire a lot more. There’s this perception that the Romans didn’t go very far in Wales, but they were actually all over the country.”
He said that the ancients in the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries had accepted the existence of a Roman road and that it had been marked on 19th century Ordnance Survey maps. “But the idea was rejected and removed from those maps,” he said.
Merrony spoke of finding a section of a perfectly preserved Roman road buried in peat and more evidence of sunken streets and low roads that are barely distinguishable today, but that followed straight paths and crossed hillside contours “with perfect economy.” all typically Roman.
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Up to five meters wide in some places, the road was “quite wide,” he said, and stretched to about 11 km. “Whoever did this must have had hundreds and hundreds of men doing it. It can only be an army.”
He said he hoped evidence of a fort could emerge along the way, but that the Celtic tribe Demetae, which inhabited present-day Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, was thought to be pro-Roman, so there would have been less need for ‘a major military presence to quell local resistance.
Merrony is the founding editor of Antiqvvs, a quarterly magazine dedicated to archeology, ancient art and history, where he will publish his latest research this month. He was also the founding director of the award-winning Mougins Museum of Classical Art in the south of France, and his books include The Situation of Rome in the 5th Century AD.
Speaking of antiquities from earlier centuries referring to a Roman road, Edward Lhwyd, a curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in the 1690s who visited Wales in 1698, noted that “throughout this mountain can be seen an old dike, or how a Roman way is conjectured, Roman coins are often found nearby ”.
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Llwyd was not only right, he said. The existence of a road made perfect sense because it connected Roman farmhouses or villas, the remains of which have been found in the area: “That’s how I started researching the road,” he said. “I thought ‘why is there a village in the middle of nowhere?'”
The route also passes directly in front of a mine, which can be significant, he believes: “I think this is one of the reasons why there is this road, the silver mine, which has never been archeologically investigated. If there is a silver mine, there is a good chance. the Romans knew it and exploited it ”.
Much of the route is within Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, which would oversee any exploratory excavations.