King Alfred: Bones of first ruler of united England are 'found' under car park in Winchester, Hampshire

The long-lost remains of King Alfred the Great have been found buried under a car park, investigators claim.

Alfred the Great has been recognised as one of the country's most important rulers as the first king of a united England - yet the whereabouts of his final resting place have long been shrouded in mystery.

But author and historical researcher Graham Phillips now claims to have discovered Alfred’s grave after a 13-year hunt.

The location is being revealed for the first time in a new episode of the British television series Weird Britain, on Blaze TV on Wednesday at 9pm.

And he has now claimed the location of the remains of one of England’s greatest kings are 20 yards from where the slab now marks where Alfred was once buried.

He added: "Bizarrely, like Richard III, the bones are under a car park."

Alfred died in 899 and his bones were repeatedly moved. He was buried in Winchester Cathedral until 1110, when his remains were moved to Winchester’s Hyde Abbey where they were interred before the high altar between the bodies of his wife and son. The abbey was demolished after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, and the place left in ruins.

In 1866, during construction of a workhouse on the site, the English antiquarian John Mellor excavated the area, found what he thought were Alfred's bones and had them reburied at nearby St Bartholomew’s Church.

But in 2013, when archaeologists exhumed and carbon-dated the bones from St Bartholomew’s churchyard, they proved to date from over 200 years after Alfred’s death - sparking Graham's interest and search.

He said: "Whoever’s bones they were, they weren’t Alfred’s. So, I decided to discover what happened to them. The quest has taken me 13 years.”

With the presumption of Alfred’s bones having perished during the building of the workhouse in the 1860s, Winchester City Council turned the Hyde Abbey site into a scenic garden with the locations of what had been Alfred’s grave, and that of his wife and son, marked with stone slabs.

Phillips, however, believes he has found evidence that the bones of all three of them had already been moved a few decades before the 1860s.

He added: "I discovered that in 1788 a prison was built next to the area, and the site where graves were was turned into a garden for the warden’s house. I’m convinced the original bones were moved at that time."

In the late 1700s, English historian Henry Howard visited Richard Page, the warden responsible for the work at the Hyde Abbey site, to obtain plans of the ruins that existed before the prison was built.

And it was while Phillips was searching for a copy of that plan in the archives of Cambridge University that he made what he describes as an astonishing discovery.

Graham added: "Howard had written an article about Hyde Abbey published in Volume 13 of Archaeologia, the journal of the London Society of Antiquaries, in 1800.

"In it, he refers to prisoners employed to landscape the warden’s new garden unearthing bones which were reburied nearby, even including a map.”