PROPS used in the swashbuckling TV series Sharpe’s Challenge will go under the hammer at a Nantwich auction house next week.

The programmes, featuring actor Sean Bean, were set two years after the Duke of Wellington crushed Napoleon at Waterloo.

The heroic Sharpe is drafted in after dispatches from India tell of a local maharaja who is threatening British interests there.

Now auctioneers Peter Wilson are offering fans the chance to bid for the actual muskets used in the filming, the penultimate episode shot in India in 2006.

They are all dummy film props but Sharpe fans are expected to be out in force at the sale on April 20 to 21.

The props include two Brown Bess muskets complete with bayonets, an East India pattern pistol and two swords, one for a British infantryman, the other a curved Indian Tulwar used in the later episode Sharpe’s Peril.

They have been sent for sale by Ian Smith, 43, a collector and antique toy dealer, who acquired them four years ago.

They were all made by an Indian company, which claims to be the country’s oldest manufacturer of firearms and edged weapons and once armourers of royal Mewar army, a powerful kingdom in Rajasthan.