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It started off as a simple hunch: That underneath their unremarkable Welsh village sat the bones of something great.

Trellech was an industrial boomtown of medieval Britain. Home to as many as 10,000 (in an era when London had 40,000) it was wiped off the map by famine, disease and, finally, massacre.

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That is, until local tollbooth worker Stuart Wilson found it under an empty field that he bought for about $55,000 CDN.

“We’re talking about a settlement that, at the time, was meant to be the largest in Wales, according to the records we have,” said Wilson, speaking by phone from Wales. He’s now the director of what he calls the Lost City of Trellech Project.

The story of Trellech is that of a Medieval Detroit: A rich industrial boomtown that was laid low just as quickly as it emerged.

The city was established in the early 1200s as an iron-manufacturing center by the Anglo-Norman rulers of England. Presumably, any number of swords wielded in that age originated from Trellech’s vast network of workshops.