After a walker called emergency services, rescuers were dispatched to find her only to find out that she had driven home hours earlier.

The rescue operation was launched after the woman called police at 2pm on Friday to say that she was in trouble.

Rescuers, including members from 5 police forces, 5 mountain resue teams and search dogs spent 5 hours searching moors in the Peak District.

However, she did not inform the authorities that she was safe and was spotted on CCTV driving home.

They had battled treacherous conditions and heavy rain during the search. A member from Woodhead Mountain Rescue Team, Steve Cullabine, said he couldn’t figure out why the woman had not informed them that she no longer needed rescuing.

He went on to say “Obviously we’ve got lots of bodies up on the moors in darkness and torrential rain so if as soon as she had got signal, she had stopped and let us know, we would have taken everyone off straight away. But as it went on, they were kept up there longer than they needed to be.”

Although they have since spoken to the woman in question rescuers are no further forward in discovering what happened. Mr Cullabine said he did not think her intentions had been malicious and that she was likely to have endured a “traumatic experience” and was “probably not thinking straight”.

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