A DOG that was swept away in Wednesday night’s flash floods turned up safe and well this morning.

Neil Holcroft thought he had lost his three-year-old chocolate labrador Jess for good when she disappeared from the banks of the River Gaunless, near Bishop Auckland.

A search party of relatives and friends trawled the river bank for miles in the hope she had climbed to safety, but gave up at midnight when there was no sign of the pet.

After a sleepless night, the 35-year-old newspaper sales executive was overjoyed when Jess turned up exhausted but alive early yesterday in High Etherley, just a mile from his home in High Greenfields.

* Read the full story in The Northern Echo tomorrow.