A 64-year-old man from the Shropshire/Powys border died after falling from a ladder in a storm while trying to clear tree branches from telephone wires outside his home, an inquest heard.

Peter James Frederick Smith was found by a neighbour lying in the road outside his house at Llanfihangel, near Llanfyllin, with massive head injuries on January 18.

An ambulance took nearly an hour to get to the scene but the inquest heard from Mr Smith’s widow that the delay had “made no difference”.

The inquest in Welshpool yesterday, Powys coroner Mr Geraint Williams read a statement from Mr Smith’s widow Joyce.

She said her husband, a heating engineer, had cle- ared one tree that fell across the road outside their house during storms in January.

On January 18 they continued to be battered by storms and during the afternoon, a branch had come off a conifer and was leaning across telephone wires. They also had a power cut.

Her husband had gone out shortly after 7pm to feed their horse and to get the branch down.

About 15 minutes later a neighbour knocked on the door telling her to call an ambulance because her husband had fallen.

She rang 999 but was “extremely frustrated” by the operator who had problems with their address and kept asking “obscure” questions, the hearing heard.

She went outside and saw her husband lying on his back in the road and she could see his head was bleeding.

Mrs Smith and her neighbour tried to resuscitate him but got no response and after about half an hour she rang the ambulance again.

Mrs Smith said she had been very clear in her instructions to the ambulance operator on where they were but an ambulance did not arrive until after 8pm.

She added that there was nothing the paramedics could have done but she found it hard to understand why it had taken so long for an ambulance to travel the six miles from Llanfyllin.

“It probably made no difference,” she said in her statement.

The coroner said a post mortem had shown that Mr Smith died from head injuries as a result of falling from a height.

He recorded a verdict of accidental death.

By Deborah Knox