A massive Roman discovery near Wrexham reveals an even older 'secret' buried beneath our feet.

A 139-pound (63-kilogram) Roman lead ingot found in 2019 led to North Wales's first confirmed Roman villa discovery. In 2026, a quern stone turned up beneath it.

In 2019, metal detectorist Rob Jones of Coedpoeth found a Roman lead ingot weighing 139 pounds (63 kilograms) near Rossett, a village outside Wrexham. The research that followed led archaeologists to the first confirmed Roman villa in North Wales.

This summer's dig showed that the villa was not the first thing on that ground.

Excavators found a complete quern stone, used to grind grain, in a layer below the stone-built villa, the University of Chester announced on October 5, 2026. The team has not yet said how old that earlier activity is or what it looked like.

Rob Jones and the lead pig

Jones has been metal detecting in and around Wrexham since 1996. The ingot, also called a pig, is a bar of lead cast from molten metal and ready for further processing. It is only about 20 inches (half a meter) long.

Fewer than a hundred lead ingots of this type are known from the mines of Roman Britain, according to Wrexham Council.

This one carries the name of Marcus Trebellius Maximus, governor of the province of Britannia from AD 63 to 69, during the reign of Nero. No other inscription with his name has been found in the United Kingdom.

Jones reported the bar straight away to the Portable Antiquities Scheme finds officer for northeast Wales, based at Wrexham Museum.

That let archaeologists record the exact find spot, and the museum later acquired the ingot. In December 2020, Wrexham Council announced that Jones had won Searcher magazine's award for the most significant find in Wales.

He said he saw posts about it from America, Russia and Norway. "I was amazed by how the news spread around the world about my find," Jones said in the council's release.

Walls under a field in Burton

The ingot was not the only Roman find around Rossett. Local detectorists also found Roman material at a site nearby, and in November 2020 Wrexham Museum, the University of Chester and Archaeological Survey West announced a villa there.

A remote sensing survey showed stone and tile buildings around a central courtyard, with a field system and a trackway.

Fieldwalking, the collection of finds from the plowed surface, produced objects from the late first to the early fourth century AD. Architectural fragments hinted at features such as underfloor heating.

Caroline Pudney, a senior lecturer in archaeology at Chester, said at the time that earlier accounts placed most local people near military sites or in simple farmsteads with Iron Age roundhouses. In her words, the villa "now questions this narrative."

The first excavation ran for three weeks in September 2021, on a site in Burton, Rossett. Pudney led it with Stephen Grenter of Wrexham Museum. She said the team hit walls just after taking off the topsoil, and early finds included a coin, part of a glass bottle and pottery.

Two weeks with DigVentures

The 2026 season was paid for in part by a crowdfunding campaign run by DigVentures, a company that runs public archaeology projects. It worked with the University of Chester from August 29 to September 10.

Chester students dug alongside professional archaeologists, local volunteers and people who had paid into the campaign.

Wrexham Museum, the Portable Antiquities Scheme and its Wales branch, PAS Cymru, were partners, along with Heneb, the Trust for Welsh Archaeology.

The team opened two main trenches. In Trench 3, DigVentures reported a possible hearth with a burnt clay surface inside a villa building.

In Trench 1, a few yards away, diggers found a hypocaust, a Roman system that heated floors with hot air from a furnace, plus a possible plunge pool.

Near the end of the dig, the Trench 1 team started on a newly found apse, a rounded end to a room. It held the base of another tile stack, one of the short pillars that held up a heated floor.

DigVentures explains how a chance find in a field near Wrexham led to the first confirmed Roman villa in North Wales. Credit: DigVentures.

The quern stone below

Ben Swain, project manager and co-site director for DigVentures, called the quern the star find of 2026. It came from a layer laid down before the villa was built in stone. "The villa clearly wasn't the earliest thing here," he said.

Swain said the main villa building went up in phases and changed its layout over time. DigVentures' site notes describe changes in both trenches.

In Trench 3 the team asked which walls came first, and in Trench 1 it counted possibly three building phases, including a wall that does not line up with the others.

According to Swain, the Trench 1 building kept intact Roman floor levels and parts of its hypocaust. At one point in its life, he said, it probably worked as a bathhouse.

Pudney described a complex that changed over generations rather than a single moment in time.

Painted plaster and trade

Finds from across the site include pottery, coins, animal bones, building materials and painted wall plaster. An August release from the university also mentioned imported pottery and high-quality building materials.

The team reads these as signs of a wealthy community tied to wider Roman trade. Swain said the residents could afford to build and keep up heated rooms and rooms decorated with painted plaster.

Those links ran across an empire whose roads appear in the most complete map of Roman roads, which charts nearly 186,000 miles.

Rossett sits between Wrexham and Chester, where the Romans established a fortress around AD 74. The council's 2020 release said most villas of the period were farms, from plain buildings to houses with mosaics, bathhouses and underfloor heating.

North Wales has produced other Roman wealth. Elsewhere in the region, a detectorist found up to 15,000 Roman coins packed into two buried pots.

The Chester team places Rossett in the western frontier zone of Roman Britain, a region better known for forts than for country houses. Farther north, on the frontier, a sewer at the Vindolanda fort showed that soldiers lived with gut parasites.

Pre-villa layers still unexplained

The excavation has now moved into post-excavation work. Finds, environmental samples and site records are being analyzed for a report that the university says will be made public.

Swain said the team is still trying to work out what came before the villa. He also wants to know whether more ranges of buildings remain unexcavated.

DigVentures listed the full layout, including a west wing and a possible bathhouse, as open questions. Its campaign page also mentions a later medieval building made of reused Roman stone, possibly a chapel.

A stretch goal of the campaign would pay for geophysical and aerial surveys of possible villa sites across the region. Plans for further digging at Rossett in 2027 depend on the analysis.

Swain said he would like to return to the Trench 1 building. Seven years after Jones reported his lead pig, the team still does not know who first used the ground beneath the villa.

The information was obtained from the University of Chester.

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