Snodland – the final frontier.

It's hard to imagine now, but at one point in time, in May 43AD to be precise, the banks of the River Medway near Snodland formed the furthermost limit of the known world, as far as the Romans were concerned...

It didn't last long. Led by their general Aulus Plautius, 20,000 Roman troops crossed the river and defeated the British forces gathered on the opposite bank, driving the remaining Britons back to the Thames, and leaving Snodland behind to become a minor – but not insignificant – outpost in this new corner of the Roman Empire.

To be precise, before the historians wade in from various riverbanks to join the melee, opinion differs as to whether the battle took place at Snodland or nearer to either Aylesford or Rochester, but either way, it was somewhere nearby.

Fast forward a couple of millennia and the banks of the Medway at Snodland were being conquered again in 2006, this time by developers, with troops armed with mechanical diggers rather than swords and javelins.

And one such digger driver hit the jackpot when he put the arm of his JCB accidentally through a Roman pot containing a huge stash of Roman coins.

"They saw all these coins come pouring out of the digger bucket," Maidstone Museum officer Laura McLean told the Kent Messenger at the time, describing the moment builders made their discovery. "It made a sound like tinkling glass.

"When we got there they had two spades with the coins on the top. It was absolutely unbelievable."

Kent County Council finds liaison officer, Dr Andrew Richardson, added: "The pot had been full of coins. There was no soil in it so it had been sealed for 1,600 years before the JCB hit it.

"We filled four bags with coins it was really heavy."

Around 3,600 coins were reported to be uncovered initially, and the hoard was said to be among the largest ever found in England – which although fantastic news, presented a few minor headaches for landowners Smurfit Kappa Paper UK, along with the developers, who were forced to keep the location secret and ramp up security, for fear of a potential rush of part time treasure hunters.

"We don't want to say exactly where it is until we've sorted ourselves out we've had 24-hour security on the site to make sure we don't get any raiding," said one company director, and the site was kept secret for two years until construction work and further archaeological investigations had been completed."

In the meantime, the hoard, estimated to have a value a modern-day value of £11,000, was whisked off to County Hall in Maidstone, where it was kept under lock and key until being taken up to the British Museum to be cleaned and recorded – and the hoard was finally said to contain a total of 4,653 coins.

So could these coins, found tantalisingly close to the rumoured site of The Battle of Medway, be linked to that historic moment; perhaps stolen and buried near to the battlefield in its aftermath?

The short and disappointing answer is no – they were all dated from between 330 and 348 AD, around 300 years after the invasion, but they do point to the potential importance of Snodland as a Roman site.

Later on, in 2010, an inquest determined the find was officially classed as treasure.

Jennifer Jackson, finds liaison officer for Kent, told the inquest the hoard was a significant find, but the coins themselves were not remarkable.

"It is a significant find in Kent and one of the largest hoards found in the county from this particular century," she said. "These coins are the most common found in Britain so there are a number of these particular finds in the country."

A further report on the Portable Antiquities Scheme database of UK finds, sheds further light on the find, stating each coin, generally known today as a 'nummus', is predominantly copper-alloy with a tiny admixture of silver.

It adds: "The legends on the reverse of the last nummi present, those of AD 348-50, invariably read FEL(ix) TEMP(orum) REPARATIO which can be translated as 'happy times are here again' ('Fel Temp' on summary). It was an optimistic hope prompted by the year 348 coinciding with the 1,100th anniversary of the traditional founding of Rome and the belief that it marked the beginning of a new age for the embattled empire."

But was whoever stamped those coins about the return of "happy times" right? The days of the Roman rule in Britain were numbered in AD350, with total collapse just half a century away, but there was arguably a few decades of stability in which the British coastline was bolstered by new forts and defences.

Nevertheless, happy times were on their way out in Roman Britain, and it wasn't long before the Roman troops were pulled back, leaving the island to those left behind – i.e. the ancestors of British tribes, Romanised to varying degrees, and an incoming wave of Germanic settlers.

Snodland Museum curator Andrew Ashbee said the hoard was a fascinating discovery, and recalled the interest it generated.

"The excavation was a big affair that went on for weeks, if not months," he recalled. "It was an exciting find. They are extremely easy to read and were in very good condition.

"When the coins came back to Maidstone, I was in touch with Giles at Maidstone Museum. He and I between us got some funding, because the cost was quite substantial. We got quite few grants, and subsequently I went to Maidstone and we had quite a box of stuff.

"Two or three years ago Maidstone Museum changed hands and they demanded all the coins back. They've allowed me to keep some of the coins on display – a couple of hundred – but the rest have gone back to Maidstone.

"It was a shame because we had a lot of coins at one point. I had started to copy and catalogue them by scanning but that came to an end when they took them back."

But he said the coin collection was just a small piece in the bigger Roman picture around the river at Snodland.

The presence of a riverside Roman villa had been first uncovered in the 1840s, before being fully excavated in the 1980s, and archaeologists determined it dated from the 1st Century, at the start of Roman occupation, to the 4th Century.

Excavations on a nearby mound, or tumulus, at Holborough had also uncovered several finds, including a a unique child's sarcophagus, now kept at Maidstone Museum.

Mr Ashbee believes is all points to long-standing importance as Snodland as a crossing point for the Romans, and a stopping point for those coming up river.

"The Romans put a villa on both sides, presumably to keep watch on the crossing," he added. "I always personally think it was a staging post for the Romans because they would come up and down the river and used the estate as likely a distribution centre, but that's a guess."

And he hopes further investigation could yet add more detail to the growing picture of Roman Snodland.

"There's another plan going ahead to put some warehouses by the bypass in Snodland, and if they do that they will have to do a proper dig. It could yield more."

A pamphlet from the Snodland Historical Society notes: "So where along the banks of the Medway did the battle take place? We cannot be certain because as yet no archaeological evidence has been discovered that indicates the exact whereabouts of the battle.

"In 1998, Nigel Nicholson had a stone monument erected on the banks of the Medway at Burham opposite All Saints church in Snodland where in the Middle Ages pilgrims used to cross the river.

He believed that it was at this spot that Vespasian and his legion crossed the Medway during the battle.

"Unlike the Batavians (Germanic mercenaries, who crossed downriver prior to the battle and launched an initial attack) the legions had not been trained to cross rivers in full armour.

"It was unlikely they would have had the time in the heat of a battle to build rafts or a bridge to cross the Medway, so they would have crossed by foot via a ford. Mr Nicholson believes they might have got this local knowledge from prisoners or collaborators, who had been using the ford since ancient times.

"If this was the case, the site of the battle of the Medway was probably located along the banks of the river somewhere between Snodland and Cuxton."