Giant hailstones pummel parts of UK as couple clinging to cliff ‘by their fingernails’ rescued

Hailstones “the size of pickled onions” battered North Yorkshire during a storm that caused chaos across the region when almost a month’s worth of rain fell in a single afternoon.

Roads were washed away, a bridge collapsed and flash flooding was widely reported as 50mm of rain fell in just one hour.

A couple had to be rescued from 100ft up a coastal cliff after they climbed the rock face to escape the sudden tide surge below them at Filey Brigg.

The man and woman were holding on “by their fingertips” – with the sea crashing below them – when help arrived, HM Coastguard said.

“The teams set up to execute two rescues side by side, quickly ensuring that the two people were made safe,” reported spokesperson Matt Atkinson. “Once the teams knew that the man and woman were not going to fall, they were able to slowly bring them up the other 50ft of the cliffs to the top.”

The pair suffered no injuries during the incident on Tuesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, police described conditions across much of the rest of the county as “shocking”.

The main road linking the town of Richmond to villages including Reeth and Keld was washed away near Grinton, while another road from Grinton to Leyburn was left with a large hole where previously there had been a small bridge over a stream.

Leonie Garrard, who runs a clothing shop in Leyburn, said the town had been cut off.

“I have never seen this in my whole life,” she told the BBC. “It has been horrendous. There’s pubs with cellars overflowing, roads have been blocked. There is more or less no way out of Leyburn at the moment.”

On the railway, a large landslide blocked the main Settle to Carlisle railway line close to Garsdale.

People across the region took to Twitter to post pictures and video of the extreme weather.

Gareth Walls, from Ripon, tweeted a clip of hailstones hammering down on to his car. “The hail was like pickled onions,” he wrote later next to a picture of himself holding a huge stone almost an inch across.

Wilf Bishop, 77, has lived in the Yorkshire Dales since 1988 and moved to Reeth in 2000 and described the weather conditions as “appalling, absolutely appalling”.

Describing how the rain came down from the hillside, he said: “We’d just got back from a walk on the hillside and it started to rain a little, then within minutes it was this astonishing downpour.”

Marco Petagna, a Met Office meteorologist, said the unsettled weather was down to a band of low pressure coming from the southwest.

He added: “Some of the storms across the north of England have had some big hailstones because the air is so unstable – conditions are perfect for generating big thunderstorms.

“There’s low pressure that’s dominated coming up from the southwest and that’s helping to generate these showers.”

He said the unstable conditions would likely continue for the next 36 hours.

Figures released on Wednesday morning showed Malham Tarn, in North Yorkshire, had suffered 82.2mm of rain in a little more than four hours. The monthly average in the area for this time of year is 89mm.

Heavy rain fell across northern and eastern England at times during Wednesday afternoon, with the possibility of heavy rain and thunder continuing into Thursday for parts of Scotland.

The extreme weather comes as the Met Office also revealed the UK’s 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2002.

Analysis further showed the 10 coldest years had all been recorded before between when records started in 1884 and 1963.

Press Association contributed to this report