Myth Hunters

In France a tiny village has attracted treasure hunters for the last 70 years. At the end of the 19th Century, priest of Rennes-le-Château, Bérenger Saunière, became fabulously rich. And nobody quite knows how. Some say the priest discovered buried treasure, but others claim Saunière uncovered a secret so profound, it could rock the foundations of the Catholic Church. But was it all just a hoax?

In 1911, Hiram Bingham was a young scholar specialising in modern Latin American history at Yale University, Connecticut. He was thirty-six years old and married to Alfreda Mitchell, an heiress to the Tiffany diamond empire; they had six children and lived in a thirty-roomed mansion on top of a hill. Bingham was a man who seemed to have all the comforts of life, but he was restless and driven. During a field trip to Peru in 1909, he was invited by his guide to see an ancient Inca site high up in the Andes Mountains. This set him on a path that would change his life forever.

In the early 1800s a party of men headed by a Thomas Beale set out from Virginia to the Colorado Rocky Mountains where they discovered gold. After mining a fortune in gold ore they exchanged it for treasure, which they then buried in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. Beale recorded the secret location of the treasure in three numerical codes that when decoded would reveal the treasures value, its location and to whom it belonged.

According to legend, he was Britain's greatest King. His name was King Arthur. He led his Knights of the Round Table from Camelot, a vast, spectacular castle built on a hill, and was supposed to have bravely fought Anglo-Saxon invaders and united the country. But there's very little evidence he really existed. History wasn't written in the Dark Ages, an era said to have been ruled by barbarism and chaos. The only way to really prove he existed was to find something with his name on it, maybe even Excalibur or the remains of the Round Table. Maybe even Camelot itself.