FINDING the skeletal parts of a human hand is not exactly an everyday event - even in the life of North-East farmer Nick Greenwell. But, then again, it isn't anything for him to get too worked up about either. For Nick has the remains of what was once an entire living, breathing town buried just beneath the fields of his farm.

Where his cows now graze was once the multi-cultural Roman town of Longovicium, now Lanchester, in County Durham. A place called home to soldiers long forgotten - from Spanish, Hungarian and German tribes to north African born people, brought by the Romans to freeze with the native North-Easterners in a remote outpost of the empire.

No one really knows what life was like for the owner of that hand found by Nick, or for the 1,000 or so of its contemporaries who were born, lived and died in the now hidden town 1,800 years ago.

But that might be about to change. Derwentside District Council is to conduct a feasibility study into the excavation of at least part of the area, with money from the Lottery and the European Union. The council made the decision to investigate further after a scan was made of a site first built in about AD140.

It seems the life-long dreams of 52-year-old Nick - dreams that include building a domed visitor centre and virtual reality complex - may finally come true.

"First and foremost we need to know what is here and there's only one way to do it," he says. "I want it to happen, not just for myself, although it would be great for us here, but for the whole area. We could have tourists from around the world coming to this place. What was buried and hidden for hundreds of years could become a major, multi-cultural centre once again."

But it's not just the obvious tourist appeal which fires his one-man campaign to have this huge site excavated. It's more about satisfying his intense curiosity about the secrets buried on his land. It's an inquisitive streak which has run through his family since 1640 and prompted by regular finds on the land.

In the 1970s, for instance, workmen were laying a new gas pipe on the outskirts of the site. A digger badly damaged 20 ceremonially buried urns containing the remains of people, residents who had once worshipped at temples to the gods, drank in pubs and frequented the brothels of this military outpost. One of the men picked up the remaining precious urn and held it, reverentially, to the light. Almost inevitably he dropped it, smashing it beyond repair.

There was another time in 1980 when Nick's then ten-year-old son, Anthony, chanced upon the remains of three spears buried just below the surface. A moment's digging revealed the spears had been placed over a makeshift hearth. In the middle of the fire were the remains of a bottle, which had once contained gin. It's enough to conjure vivid images of life in those times; soldiers huddling around a fire to warm themselves against the cold North-East wind, the strong brew beginning to take hold as the night grows old. Eventually someone smashes the empty bottle in the fire.

Dozens of discoveries have prompted dozens of stories in the Greenwell family lexicon.

Walk around the site and there is evidence of what could have been an amphitheatre and a temple to a forgotten god. There's a mine of information just waiting to be harvested.

One of the few men in the region who can help is Durham County Council archaeologist Niall Hammond. He explains that work on Roman forts across the country - including those at Binchester, Piercebridge and Ebchester in County Durham - have taught us much about military operations at the forts but little about what was going on in the towns, or the lives of the people that lived there.

"Lanchester is just one fort on what we know as Dere Street - the Roman Road that ran from deep into Yorkshire up to Hadrian's Wall," he says. "But the really interesting, and unique, thing about Lanchester is the fact that there is what seems to be an exceptionally well preserved town there. "In the first 100 years, after the Romans had taken the land from the Mersey to the Humber up to Scotland and finally tamed the wild northern Brigante tribe, it seems that they had a policy of Romanisation. They would build small towns with capitalist type economies and try and impose a Roman way of life on the local people.

"We are only just beginning to understand this but it seems that they were only half successful in their Romanisation. And you get the feeling that from somewhere along the line they gave up on the idea."

It seems the North-Eastern people, the mighty Brigantes, were only ever half tamed.

Niall does his best to fill in a few gaps of what happened to those people during and after the 400-year Roman occupation. He argues that Lanchester may have been mothballed at certain times. When the Romans left, it seems that mainly aristocratic families would occupy places like Lanchester, trying to capture some of the glory of Rome for their own ends. Lanchester seems to have been by-passed by the marauding armies during the following few centuries. Those Northumbrian and enemy armies, both British and Viking, that looted and destroyed many other similar forts.

Or so it seems, though until this remote, anonymous patch of land just outside Lanchester is opened up, the world will have to rely on tiny clues unearthed by Nick and people like him.