He's the luckiest man alive: Driver's miracle escape from crash on Northamptonshire country road

A driver was labelled "the luckiest man" alive after his miracle escape from a car crash on a Northamptonshire lane late last night (Thursday).

Stunned residents in a row of countryside cottages found a car landed upside down in their front garden after a trail of destruction along a stretch of Harlestone Road, near Church Brampton.

The Hyundai i30 demolished a speed limit sign, narrowly missed crashing down onto the railway line between Northampton and London Buckby, hit a bridge, bollards and then a tree before finally flipping onto its roof and landing inches away from Railway Cottages.

And yet the 27-year-old driver walked away with barely a scratch.

One of the residents, Andrew Garner, said: "He must be the luckiest man alive. I'm still in a bit of shock that he got straight out of the car.

"The first thing he did was apologise for ruining my hedge."

Emergency services dashed to the scene of the crash at around 11.20pm.

Mr Garner added: "I heard it because I was in our kitchen. I thought at first a lorry had veered off the road and something had come off.

"I could only just squeeze out of my gate because the car was in the way. A young lady driving in the opposite direction had stopped to help and all I could hear was her saying: 'oh my god, you're all right.' I got him a chair to sit down and gave him a glass of water but he was fine.

"I walked back further and further down the road with the police and and we could see the tyre tracks where he had come off the road. He must have travelled about 60 metres before landing where he did.

"It looked like he's come up the hill towards Harlestone, hit a slow-down sign which is all bent to pieces, then riven between some bollards protecting the bridge and the wall itself, hit a tree where our row of house start then flipped and taken my hedge completely out of the ground.

"I heard the scratching as he came across the railway bridge then the noise stopped, which I guess was when he was in the air. Then this loud crash.

"If he'd been a couple of feet the other way and missed the bridge he could easily have ended up on the railway tracks."

A spokesman for Northamptonshire Police said: "We received a call at about 11.20pm on Thursday March 5 when a grey Hyundai i30 was in collision with a tree in Harlestone Road, Church Brampton.

"The had car flipped onto its roof. A 27-year-old man was taken to hospital as a precautionary measure only."