The abandoned village with beautiful new homes where no-one has ever lived

It is nestled among green fields and could at first glance pass for a quaint little hamlet of white-fronted homes with red and grey-tiled roofs. There's a street or two and even something that looks like it could be a little school or community hall.

But look closer and there's something a little unsettling about the scene. Stare as long as you like and you won't see a single person. No lights will illuminate the windows when it gets dark and there won't be a sound beyond the wind and steady rain that are common in these parts.

There are no paved roads leading either to or from this ghost community. Eerily still, it feels less like a village and more like a film set abandoned mid-scene. Despite being built only a decade or so ago and visited by King Charles when he was Prince of Wales, no-one has ever lived here. But there was a time when it "looked incredible", says digital storyteller and former broadcaster Jay Curtis, with "fresh paint, green grass, one of the houses fully decorated as a show home". Clearly, a lot of time, work and money had gone into it. So what on Earth happened?

The houses were built on the site of a former BP crude oil refinery in Llandarcy, on the outskirts of the town of Neath in south Wales in 2013 - made from traditional Welsh stone using cutting-edge construction techniques. They were designed as a showcase for an environmentally sustainable village made up of thousands of new homes and had the backing of the then-Prince Charles.

In fact, the development was inspired by his Poundbury development in Dorset and he said he was "trying to break the commercial mould with the kind of challenges the world is now facing". But 13 years after they were built, the homes are empty with no infrastructure connected to them.

The original vision was for the empty houses to be part of a 25-year regeneration project, a £1.2bn environmentally-sustainable urban village of 4,000 homes, 10,000 residents and four schools. In some ways, that vision succeeded. Not far from the abandoned village, the neat streets of the new Coed Darcy housing estate do indeed now stand on what had been the vast, polluted remnants of the UK's first crude oil plant which closed in 1997. After years of intensive land remediation - stripping away contamination, chemicals and hazards left behind by decades of refining - construction began.

And while around 250 homes were built at Coed Darcy and are now lived in, roads planned to link the development to nearby Neath and even the city of Swansea were started but not finished. The empty hamlet was constructed as a showcase, a test village designed to demonstrate what could be achieved on the former refinery site. These early homes were built ahead of surrounding infrastructure and were intended to be folded into the wider development as it expanded. But the expansion never came.

The hamlet sits moments from the M4 motorway where thousands of motorists pass daily, largely unaware of what lies just beyond the roadside. There are no pavements leading in, no clear access roads, and yet locals report signs of activity.