Is there another king buried under a car park?

A historical researcher claims to have found the remains of King Alfred the Great buried under a car park in Winchester.

Graham Phillips believes he has identified the location just 20 yards from the garden slab that has long marked the king's presumed grave.

It is the latest chapter in a search that has run for more than a century, littered with false starts, wrongly identified bones, and at least one dig that turned out to belong to someone else entirely.

The University of Winchester has since responded to the claim, but has stopped short of endorsing it.

Phillips, speaking to BBC Radio Solent, said the findings followed a 13-year hunt that began after a previous excavation failed to locate the king.

Alfred died in 899 and was buried at Winchester's Old Minster, before being moved by his son, Edward the Elder, to the New Minster.

In 1110 he was moved again to Hyde Abbey, where he was interred in front of the high altar alongside his wife and son.

The abbey was demolished after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in 1539.

In 1866, the antiquarian John Mellor excavated the ruined abbey site during construction of a workhouse and believed he had found the royal remains.

They were reburied in an unmarked grave at nearby St Bartholomew's Church.

But when archaeologists from the University of Winchester exhumed and carbon-dated those bones in 2013, they turned out to date from more than 200 years after Alfred's death.

A year later, a fragment of pelvis bone recovered from a community excavation carried out at Hyde Abbey between 1995 and 1999 was identified as a plausible match for either Alfred or Edward the Elder.

It has never been conclusively proven either way.

Phillips believes the bones were moved again in 1788, when a prison was built next to the abbey ruins and the site was landscaped into a garden for the prison warden.

He said an 1800 journal article - complete with a hand-drawn map - describes prisoners unearthing a lead-lined coffin and bones during that work, which were then reburied nearby.

He told BBC Radio Solent he came across the article while researching an entirely different historical mystery, the search for King Arthur, at Cambridge University.

"Bizarrely, like Richard III, the bones are under a car park," Phillips said.

He is calling for a non-invasive ground-penetrating radar survey of the car park - the same method used to locate Richard III's remains in Leicester in 2012 - to be carried out before any excavation is considered.

Phillips's claim has not been independently reviewed by any archaeologist or heritage body.

Dr Katherine Weikert, head of the School of Humanities at the University of Winchester, said: "Our medieval past is filled with meaning for today's world. It is always great to see people excited about medieval history, and doubly so when it comes to Alfred here in Winchester."

She added that the university's own investigations had shown finding Alfred's resting place to be "complex," and that it continues to work with Hyde900 on investigating the abbey complex.

Phillips, who has written 27 books on historical mysteries - from the grave of King Arthur to the death of Napoleon - admits he is used to reaching the edge of a puzzle without quite completing it.

"Very often I can find good proof to finalise the argument," he said, "but very often it's left open, and somebody else in the future may have to take it up."