A WARTIME theme museum has had an uplifting gift - in the form of sections of a Second World War barrage balloon.

Eden Camp Museum near Malton was given the pieces by Andrew Donovan, who lives in Hunmanby.

Museum spokesman Nick Hill said: "We don’t have anything else like this on site, and whilst barrage balloons were a fairly common sight during the war, it makes you wonder how many have survived, and how much of the surplus material sold after the war is still around."

Mr Donovan's father bought the material as ex-war material surplus at the end of the war, with the intention of using it to waterproof a coracle that he was building which would allow him to go salmon fishing on the River Wye but in the end he used some aluminium panels which he also acquired.

Such balloons used to hang in the sky over cities, tethered to the ground - and often each other - by steel cables which could slice through an aircraft's wing.