The sight of Richard III's skeleton, found entombed beneath a Leicester car park in 2012, was enough to touch the flintiest heart.

He may have been a child murderer - the jury is still swithering over that verdict - but there was something pitiful in thinking that after being hacked to death, this royal had been left to moulder, lost and unmourned for centuries. The only lasting tribute to him until now has been Shakespeare's play, a work which, for all its literary brilliance, is more propaganda than historical fact. Yet even in this most partisan account of Richard's perfidy and downfall, the bard imbues his cruelly deformed hunchback with an apprehension of judgement to come and a depth of melancholy and regret that one can safely assume most rulers of those times felt. Given the nature of their command, none of their consciences can have been easy.

Sadly, being chained to my desk this week prevents me joining the anticipated queue to see Richard's coffin as it lies on view in Leicester Cathedral. Yesterday evening, after his bones were carried around the landmarks where the Battle of Bosworth took place in 1485, the last of the Plantagenet kings was honoured by a special service in the cathedral. On Thursday he will be buried with pomp and reverence, yet noticeably absent at that historic event will be any heads of state. Only the Duke of Gloucester and the Countess of Wessex will attend. You could be forgiven for thinking that, far from being a signal that Richard III is old news, his reinterment, to such civic fanfare and public anticipation, shows just how important and divisive a figure he remains. After all, without his defeat and death the Tudor line might not have taken the throne, and the history of these isles would have been very different. Who would be on the throne today had the House of York prevailed that fateful day?

As t-shirts, mugs and olde worlde meads are sold in Leicestershire this week to mark Richard's reburial, excitement in the area - and internationally - is palpable. Yet what is it that we find thrilling? When the car park excavation led to his discovery, it was as if Raiders of the Lost Ark had met Silent Witness, such was the grisly drama. But once the mystery of the long-lost king had been solved, what was left to fuel the imagination?

One sour Anglican priest has said that the level of interest is "faintly idolatrous, as if monarch bone worship had come into fashion". In a way he's right. Except that today, none but those who still believe in fairies will expect that touching the oak and yew coffin in which his casket lies will cure their asthma or gout. Nor are they in awe simply because the former King of England is a celebrity of the first rank. It is not Richard's royalty, I'd suggest, that makes him an object of such fascination, but the story that his bones contain. Even if the grave had been that of a lowly soldier, the remains would still have been significant, bringing with them a reminder of the bedrock on which Britain has been built.

Layers of historical sediment are laid every year, but it is only with hindsight and distance that history begins to make sense. There's still a lot to be learned about Richard's reign, but to have him restored to public view is like slotting a crucial piece of a jigsaw into place. The picture becomes a little more complete. It's odd how, not until a reminder of the past is dug up do people realise how much history matters to them. None of us feels completely detached from our forebears, or what happened before we were born. Richard III's rediscovery is a reminder of the sort of world from which our own was born. And although his era is in some ways unimaginably distant, most of us can find an echo of our own life and experience in his.

Of course, you will probably never look at a car park in the same way again. One day we all might be consigned to oblivion beneath tarmac or cement. Before then, however, there are other bones that must be unearthed, if only for peace of mind. The hunt should therefore begin for the head and skeleton of James IV, which became separated at some point after his brutal death at Flodden. His body is thought to lie in a monastery beneath the 14th hole of the Royal Mid-Surrey Golf Course in Richmond. Meanwhile his skull could possibly be buried under a London pub called The Red Herring. You might find me there one evening, a glass in one hand, a pick axe in the other.