‘Port Talbot Pompeii’ find stuns archaeological team

Experts ‘strike gold’ with largest Roman villa discovery

- HARRY COCKBURN

The buried remains of the largest Roman villa ever found in Wales have been detected beneath parkland on the south coast, in an “amazing” discovery that archaeologists have described as “Port Talbot’s Pompeii”.

The remains were discovered when a team was assembled to investigate the pre-industrial heritage of Margam Park, on the edge of Port Talbot, and they “struck gold” when geophysical surveys revealed the footprint of an unexpectedly large Roman villa complex.

The team, led by Swansea University’s Centre for Heritage Research and Training (CHART), said the villa was “of a scale and level of preservation unmatched across the region”, and that it would offer “unparalleled information about Wales’s national story”.

Project lead Dr Alex Langlands, an associate professor and the co-director of CHART, told The Independent that when the scale of the find became apparent, “it was like being transported back to my childhood and the raw enthusiasm I had for archaeology back then”.

Dr Langlands described his excitement on seeing a screenshot of the geophysical surveys. “I was literally like, ‘Oh my God.’ I couldn’t believe it... You can immediately recognise, on morphological grounds, the shape of a monument, and there was no doubt that this was a Roman villa.