What started out as an archaeological dig to uncover a Roman road, has revealed a time of industry and opulance. Jamie Bowman reports...

SO what exactly did the Romans really did for us in North Wales? Well according to the findings of a new archaeological dig in a field outside Flint it was actually quite a lot.

Video by Rick Matthews

The last few weeks have seen experts and volunteers unearth roads, buildings, furnaces and pottery along with evidence that a busy Roman industrial complex once flourished here smelting lead ores from nearby Halkyn Mountain.

Add to this the possible traces of a small quay and Pentre Ffrwndan in Oakenholt is revealing itself as an important part of the Roman's foothold in this far flung part of their huge Empire.

"Lead has been processed here right the way back to Celtic times," explains Ian Grant, senior archaeologist for Clwyd Powys Archaeological Trust. "When the Romans came here they established a fortress at Chester and right back to the 18th century people have been finding evidence of lead smelting here in their back gardens.

"The remains of a villa of someone with military status has been found alongside this road as well as workshops and there is also evidence of the road which linked the fortress in Chester with the one in Caernarfon so basically this was the main highway through the region."

Few actual Roman mine sites have been identified on Halkyn Mountain, but positive evidence is known of the sites on the banks of the Dee at Flint where the lead ore was brought down by horse and cart from the mountain and then processed before shipment of the refined metal.

"It was high quality lead with a good silver content," says Ian. "They were probably trading it with the local tribe before they came as conquerors so they were fully aware of it and have gone to use an enslaved local workforce to smelt the lead down into ingots or make smaller items.

"The lead was then shipped from the port behind us upstream to the fortress at Chester where it could be used for all manner of things from plumbing and piping to roofing. It could also have been shipped straight out and over to the continent and wherever it was needed across the Roman Empire."

Crucial to the region's fortunes was the Dee itself with the tribe, whose territory extended over the coastal area of north-east Wales and known to early Roman writers as the Deceangli, giving their name to the river which became Dwy in modern Welsh and gave its name to Deva, the Roman name for Chester.

"It was easily accessible and they needed an inlet where they bring the ore down from the mountain," says Ian. "This site would have been completely industrial and the waters probably came in right up to the road.

"You can imagine huge Roman galleys coming in and it's interesting that the lead smelting actually went on here for a long time afterwards."

Ian and his team originally arrived at the site in order to survey the road but ended up discovery a completely new set of ruins which they did not expect.

"We came here looking for a road which you'd think would be a simple task," he laughs. "They're usually fairly easy to excavate once you discover them but in this case I can't find it!

"But I've found something better and that's a building which is a completely new discovery. It has workshops and different floors and we know it's Roman because it's absolutely teeming with Roman pottery and a lot of material on the surface of the floors.

"In many ways it is a better result because we know this is a building of status and it will help us work out where the road is exactly."

The settlement, which occupies an area of around three hectares either side of Chester Road (A 458) in the Pentre Bridge area, between St David’s Church and The Yacht public house (formerly The Ship), will hopefully now be the subject of further excavations.

"I can't answer when that'll be but we'll feed back our findings to the people at Cadw who have sponsored this project," added Ian. "The dig has been part of an archaeological assessment of the Romans in Deeside which has been reviewing the existing evidence for Roman activity along the whole of the Deeside coastal strip.

"The aim is to make people who live around here more aware of the Roman heritage that is around here and to that end we've been getting a lot of them involved by digging in their back gardens and we've also had around 150 school children here.

“This dig demonstrates that the whole Roman settlement and industry in this area expands beyond where we currently know it to and it shows there is a bigger infrastructure here than presently known as well as telling us that the limits of this Roman settlement are still not known.”