A TEENAGE Bolton girl suffered spinal injuries in the Lake District at the weekend after plunging 50ft down a hill.

Elspeth Catriona Rhodes, 14, a pupil at Bolton School, was walking along a fell path at Hall Bank, Patterdale, on Saturday afternoon as part of a orienteering exercise with a other pupils and a teacher when she took a short cut and slipped on a pile of leaves.

Elspeth tumbled down the steep mossy, rocky bank, cutting her head and injuring her back.

While other pupils comforted her and kept her warm the alarm was raised by a teacher who radioed back to the school's training centre at nearby Patterdale Hall, which sent for the emergency services.

A team of 17 people from Patterdale Mountain Rescue were brought in to reach her and she was placed on a special inflatable spinal mattress and stretcher before being attached to safety ropes and lowered down the hill.

"She was talking and cheerful throughout," said mountain rescue team leader Dave Freeborn.

Elspeth, of Naylor's Terrace, Belmont, was carried to a waiting ambulance and taken to a Carlisle hospital where a scan revealed that her vertebrae had been damaged.

She had stitches put into the cuts on her head and has been transferred to hospital in Newcastle where her parents, Jennifer and Roy are at her bedside.

She has not been paralysed and has movement in her limbs but specialists are due to decide soon whether to operate. "She is apparently still very cheerful," said Bolton School girls' division head Miss Jane Panton.

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