Torbay RNLI pulled two teenagers from a cliff ledge on Brixham’s coastline after an overnight rescue that ended at 05:15 on Wednesday. The pair had been stranded below a sheer cliff face and could not be reached from land.

The call began at 23:30 BST on Tuesday, when concerned parents reported four children in the Battery Gardens area of Brixham. Brixham Coastguard Rescue Team later found two of them in Churston Woods, while the other two were located on a ledge at the bottom of a cliff in the Seven Quarries area.

That left the lifeboat crew with a rescue that had to be done from the water, not the shore. Torbay RNLI said it devised a recovery plan with the Coastguard Rescue Team and Devon and Cornwall Police, then used an inshore lifeboat to work its way close to the ledge as rough seas and a sudden thunderstorm made the scene more dangerous. By dawn, the tired and cold casualties were safely recovered.

Jack Hawketts said the coastline is not easy to reach at night, especially when the sea is behaving badly. He said the crew of the inshore lifeboat, backed by the all-weather lifeboat and its crew, were able to put hours of training into practice and get a good result. He added that the team was now looking forward to a little more sleep after the overnight call-out.

The rescue came after Torbay RNLI had already been working the same stretch of coast earlier in the night, when it recovered eight stranded paddleboarders. That made the Brixham operation a long shift rather than a single dramatic response, and it underlined how quickly conditions on the water can turn one emergency into another. What has not been explained is how the four children ended up split between woods and cliff edge in the first place.