ORDINARY PEOPLE

RARELY has history been brought more dramatically to life than by the discovery of centuries-old bones under a car park.

Six months later experts confirmed the bent skeleton, which bore 10 wounds, was Richard III, killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, aged 32.

His naked corpse had been slung over a horse, taken to nearby Leicester and buried without ceremony.

The fate of the last of England’s kings to die in battle remained a mystery until writer and amateur historian

Philippa Langley had a hunch about a council car park.

The archaeologists’ amazing 2012 find is the subject of a new film, The Lost

King, starring Sally

Hawkins as Philippa and co-written by Steve

Coogan.

Sally, inset, is already being tipped for an Oscar.

The discovery of Richard III, who was reburied at Leicester Cathedral in 2015, was astonishing but the past rears its head more often than you may think.

Ordinary people, often in very ordinary circumstances such as gardening and dog walking, have stumbled on rare treasures from the past.

The British Museum in London has a Portable Antiquities Scheme, run with the National Museum of Wales, where many such items are dated, valued and declared “official treasure” or returned to finders – usually metal detectorists.

It is the first stop if you unearth a potentially significant find. Senior treasure registrar Ian Richardson said the location of an object is important as it will tell us something about the lives of people in that region.

In Scotland, you must legally hand to the Crown anything of historical or archaeological interest. In the rest of the UK if a find is not declared “treasure” you can keep it.

If a discovery is deemed treasure there is a reward, split 50/50, for the finder and the landowner of the place where it was found.

Experts and auction houses will estimate the treasure’s market value but the Government decides on the reward. Ian said: “It is a complicated and long-winded but very fair process.

“It gives finders a lot of opportunities to have their say and has been designed to encourage people to do the right thing and declare their finds.

“People are sometimes unhappy with the valuation that is reached. They tend to think what they have found is priceless or sometimes just want to keep it.”

Ian said: “We have a lot of things that could turn out to be treasure coming in all the time – five to 10 items a day. A lot of may not so interesting but you just never know.”