Major finding of a large Roman fort in wales
Dr Mark Merrony,
Supernumerary Fellow, Wolfson College, University of Oxford
Date: 20th of January 2027
Time: 20:00
Venue: Zoom
Dr Merrony is an accomplished field archaeologist. His recent discovery of a Roman fort in west Wales was followed by a successful survey and a trial excavation was planned for this past July. This previously unknown fort overturns past assumptions that the local population was on peaceful terms with the invading Romans. His talk will focus on his findings.
About the speaker:
Dr Mark Merrony is Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, with research interests in the archaeology and history of the Roman Empire, especially the Middle East, and the Romano-British context, notably the Cherwell valley, Oxfordshire, and west Wales.
Dr Merrony studied Archaeology at Saint Davids University College, Lampeter as well as Classical Archaeology at Wolfson College and Somerville College, University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a Fellow at Wolfson.
He has worked in magazine publishing in the fields of archaeology, art history, and history since 2002. He specialises in the Roman period and has authored several books and articles in this area.
Image attribution - An artist’s reconstruction depicts the Roman fort in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Credit: Roman Fort Project
OTHER EVENTS
Guided Walk Around Chesham – LIVE
A painting of Chesham in 1750
The Unlikely Spies of Medieval Europe
Date: 20th of May 2026
Time: 20:00
Venue: Zoom
Speaker: Prof Jenny Benham, Medieval History, School of History, Archaeology & Religion, Cardiff University
Spies were a common feature of political, diplomatic and courtly life in the period of early medieval Europe. In this article, Jenny Benham explores some interesting contemporary representations of spies, in both literature and art. These stories and images reveal key features of the culture and practices surrounding these so-called ‘little birds’ who listened to and passed on important secret information.
The Search for American Vikings: Untangling Myth from Reality (Preceded by AGM)
Date:15th of Ocotober 2025
Time: 20:00 (19:35 for AGM)
Venue: Zoom
Speaker: Martyn Whittock, Independent Researcher and Author
For a thousand years, Norse sagas (written in 13th-century Iceland) claimed that Vikings migrated from Greenland to reach a land to the West called ‘Vinland.’ It was, and is, a claim that stimulates the imagination and controversy, for it insists that Vikings influenced lands very far from Scandinavia. In this talk – based on my book American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America – I explore the evidence for this in the literary sources and archaeology (most notably on Newfoundland); claims regarding runestones ‘discovered’ in the USA; and the way this idea of ‘Vinland Vikings’ has fed into the cultural DNA of North America and especially the USA. In recent times that has led to their co-option by the US far-right as seen in the ‘Unite the Right’ rally at Charlottesville (2017) and on January 6th at the US Capitol. This talk will explore both the evidence for Norse settlement in North America and why it became (and remains) so important in the ‘deep story’ of contested US identities.