Eleven fire officers have been honoured for their work in rescuing a horse from a frozen lake near Wolverhampton on Christmas day.

The team spent more than two hours painstakingly chipping away the ice with an axe in order to pull stricken animal Ghillie out of frozen water at Patshull Park Hotel Golf and County Club.

They battled treacherous driving conditions to get to the scene and found only the horse’s head and neck visible above the ice.

The thoroughbred mare was was paddling and out of her depth after walking onto the ice.

Melanie Brown, from Sedgley, alerted the emergency services to the horse’s plight when she came across her while enjoying a Christmas Day walk.

Firefighters put inflated walkways around the horse as they broke the ice.

Station manager Mick Daniels said: “The rescue of a horse is always difficult as even the most placid horse can be very dangerous when panicked or stressed.

“In this particular case the rescue was very complex in the fact the horse had fallen through ice and was in near freezing water being some distance from the safety of dry land. It was very difficult work to break through the ice using conventional tools and the thickness of the ice was unpredictable, being up to a foot thick in places but thinner in others.”

When she was eventually pulled from the water, Ghillie’s condition was critical.

RSPCA inspector Jackie Hickman helped Ghillie’s owner Sue Taylor with emergency first aid and used straw,  rugs and a gas fire heater to dry the animal.It took her two hours to recover.

All the fire officers and Insp Hickman have now been awarded RSPCA Certificates of Commendation.