A LEISURELY stroll in woods near Bromsgrove turned into a scary experience for a well-known Midlands TV news presenter.

Recently, as dusk was falling, Suzanne Virdee and her photographer husband, Andrew Fox, were walking in fields near Randan Woods at Dodford when to their amazement they spotted a roaming wild boar.

"At first we couldn't understand why a flock of sheep were running towards us ," said the popular BBC Midlands Today journalist and presenter.

"It was then that we spotted the unmistakable shape of a boar coming up behind them. It was like a throw back to medieval times.

"It was at that point that we both took to our heels and fled."

Suzanne, from Redditch, who cut her journalist teeth on the Advertiser/Messenger when she had a spell of work experience on the paper in 1989, added that although they had been startled they felt privileged to see a wild boar in the flesh.

But while sightings of boars have been seen elsewhere in the Midlands this is a first for the Randan woods, and the county.

A spokesman for Worcestershire Wildlife Trust, which manages this remnant of the former vast Feckenham Forest, said the sighting there was unusual, but in the past there had been an unsubstantiated report of one seen in nearby Chaddesley Woods.