Tamworth Herald photographer Paul Barber was on the spot when a nosey fox terrier called ‘Rock’ was rescued from a drainage pipe four feet underground in the middle of nowhere.

The result was a full colour page of pictures.

But he only just made it to the scene in time.

“The only location we’d been given for the rescue was “near Alvecote bridge” – but there’s three bridges in Alvecote. In the end, it wasn’t near any of them!” said Paul.

He spent about an hour in total, looking for the rescue scene and eventually spotted some red blobs on the horizon which he realised were fire engines in a field.

After legging it across three fields, Paul arrived at the end of the two-hour rescue operation just as a JCB was helping firemen reach the terrified animal who has disappeared during a walk with his owner the previous night.

The owner had failed to find his pet after letting him off the lead and had returned home to report him missing. Meanwhile, another dog walker heard Rock’s distressed barking and raised the alarm.

Rock had disappeared 15 feet into the drainage pipe, and a large boulder was stopping him getting any further. The pipe was too small for him to turn round and go back the way he’d come.

Paul, who has worked for the Herald for 18 years – 15 as a regular freelancer and the last three as a staffman – tackled a similar job earlier in the year when he did a page of pictures of the rescue of a flock of sheep and lambs stranded in a flooded field.

But the Herald staff are quick to point out that they don’t just photograph sheep and dogs on their patch.

Photographer Paul Kite had a taste of the bright lights recently when he photographed American hearthrob George Clooney at a film premiere in Birmingham.