Details of the wreck 120ft down and one mile offshore are to be disclosed at Kinghorn Fife -

Details of the wreck, 120ft down and one mile offshore, are to be disclosed at Kinghorn, Fife – one day before the 350th anniversary of the execution of the King in London.Navy experts and marine archaeologists are not expected to be able to say it definitely is the ship.But according to defence sources the wreck, buried under several feet of silt, matches the size and shape of the barge and there is “growing optimism” it is the Blessing of Burntisland. The king watched helplessly from his flagship, the Dreadnought, as a large slice of royal Stuart treasure vanished under the waves and more than 30 of his entourage perished. The Blessing foundered shortly after leaving Burntisland, bound for Leith. Twenty carts loaded with the King’s personal possessions from his hunting palace at Falkland were aboard.The wooden ferry, known to treasure hunters as “Britain’s Tutankhamun”, was also carrying a 280-piece silver dinner service commissioned by King Henry VIII and other ornate tapestries, silks and trappings for Charles’s coronation tour of Scotland. Lost in a storm crossing the Firth of Forth in 1633, the ship was loaded with the King’s priceless possessions.
The archaeologists believe it could be the most important find for them since the discovery of the Tudor warship the Mary Rose. MARINE ARCHAEOLOGISTS will announce today the discovery of what they believe to be the treasure-laden wreck of Charles I’s baggage ferry, the Blessing of Burntisland.

Such yarns generally end with a crown and a marriage – although we may have to wait until the series’ end for that.Humphrey Carpenter, editor of the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature and himself the inventor of the comic wizard Mr Majeika, likens Rowling’s books to “fake antique cars” and finds in them “an ingenious mish-mash of all sort of exciting things” rather than a genuinely new vision.. Look at the Potter plots, and you will also discover archetypal elements common to folk-tales around the globe, as an orphaned or abandoned prince claims his birthright through cunning, craft and ordeal. At the start of the century, Edith Nesbit had also planted plausible modern children in a colourful terrain of fantasy with Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet.The very real Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll’s friend and muse, stands at the source of this rich stream of works that send grubbily authentic kids on fabulous but enriching missions. Not long before that, in 1934, PL Travers’s Mary Poppins had placed her own benign hex on the sedate Banks household, sliding up the bannisters and serving tea on the ceiling.Harder to find now is the powerful blend of realism and magic that the former Poet Laureate John Masefield brought to his novels for children, The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights.

The fizz and fun of the lessons he gives to his young pupils Kay and Wart mean that the book has dated less than almost any “adult” novel of its year.Months earlier, JRR Tolkien had published The Hobbit: his Gandalf is the charismatic wizard responsible, then as now, “for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures”. And, decade after decade, children’s tastes prove the imagination grasps reality in a more mysterious way. In strongly plotted, vividly imagined children’s literature, the concept of “escapism” means little.
It is true the Harry Potter craze connects with the bewitching classics of the immediate pre- and postwar years more closely than with the more recent grimmer children’s fare. Any Harry fan who needs another fix of comic sorcery should seek out T H White’s sparklingly witty, sly Arthurian fantasia from 1938, The Sword in the Stone.

Indeed, White’s wizard Merlyn has graduated from “a college for Witches and Warlocks under the sea”. The intrepid sorcerer’s apprentice at Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry – with his two mega-selling novels, thriving adult fan club and seven-figure Warners movie deal – has carried into the 1990s a long tradition in British children’s writing of spellbinding yarns. Decade after decade, teachers try to make new readers love the sort of gritty streetwise writing that will strengthen their grip on the world. HARRY POTTER is far from the first young hero of a favourite children’s book to have enjoyed a more exotic education than the National Curriculum allows.