A Powys hero has revealed how he helped rescue a woman after the van she was driving came off the road and went down a 150-foot embankment.

Hedd Jones, who works as a haulier, near Llanidloes spotted that something was strange on his morning drive home on the dam road on Llyn Clywedog earlier this month.

After locating the female driver, he noted that the van had only been stopped from entering the water by crashing into a tree.

Hedd said: “I was coming home and noticed there was mud not far from the top of the dam road, mud that you wouldn’t think would be there and the fence was flat.

“I go down there every day. I was on the phone to my wife at the time thinking ‘Right, I think someone is off the road’”.

Hedd said it was “panic stations” before he turned around at the top of the road and came back to the scene and abandoned his car in the road telling his wife on the phone to ring for help.

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“Just before I went to jump the fence to go down,” said Hedd, “I saw an ambulance coming round the corner. I stood in the middle of the road, flagging my arms and he pulled up next to me. I asked him ‘Have you had a report of a car going off the cliff?’"

Hedd then jumped the fence and went down the bank to try and get to whoever was there.

“As I was tumbling down the bank I was shouting “Is anyone alive? Can you hear me?” and I heard this little voice. I dived down the bank and I heard a woman saying “Help me, help me”.

"I went across and I found her laying across the bank.”

“She had done well. She had come about 50 yards out of the van and up the bank. There was a tree holding the van from going in the water. She had somersaulted the van and it had gone bumper to bumper, I don’t know how she lived to see that and get out of the van.”

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The woman had “split all of her head open” and told Hedd that she may have broken her ribs.

“I just reassured her and said ‘Look I am here with you now but you are going to need to put your pain aside because I need to get you back up that hill’,” said Hedd.

He then had her put her on his shoulders while he used the bracken on the side of the bank to pull the pair of them 150ft up the hill.

“I did have a joke with her on the way up telling her “You want to do the lottery?” – because no-one I know who went off the dam road has ever survived.”

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After she was taken to hospital for treatment Hedd was told that emergency services were searching in the wrong area.

“The services didn’t even know she was in that area,” said Hedd. “They said that they thought she was on the other side of the lake because her phone had died and they couldn’t get an exact location.”

Thankfully, Hedd said the woman involved appears to have been ok and he was told she has been discharged from hospital.