Spanish dig closes in on burial site of Irish lord Red Hugh O'Donnell

Valladolid archaeologists find human skull in chapel where Christopher Columbus was also buried

Somewhere beneath a street in north-west Spain - probably between a bank branch and a budget clothes shop - lies the ruined chapel where an eight-toed rebel Irish lord was buried after his final, fatal mission 418 years ago.

Red Hugh O'Donnell, who escaped captivity and led a rebellion that almost expelled the Tudor English forces from Ireland, fled to Spain after the Battle of Kinsale in 1602 when the rebels tried to team up with a beleaguered Spanish expeditionary force.