Animal lovers Nick and Julie Packham made a 250-mile round trip to make sure a rare albino hedgehog survives.

The couple, from Pluckley, near Ashford, drove all the way to Mrs Packham’s home town in Aylesbury to take the young male to an animal sanctuary.

Mrs Packham said: “We drove there and back that night.

"Originally when we found it we were feeding it in the garden but the sanctuary told us it would not survive in the wild.

“I chose that particular place because I already know it and it has an excellent reputation. I wanted to be sure the hedgehog had the best home.”

Mr and Mrs Packham had found the male hedgehog a couple of weeks earlier in their garden in Lambden Road and would leave it food.

But relatives advised them that it should go to a sanctuary as, being an albino, it was more vulnerable.

Mrs Packham rang the Tiggywinkles Animal Sanctuary in Buckinghamshire, where staff warned her the hedgehog’s distinctive colour meant it would be very quickly picked out by predators.

She said: “We already suspect this animal is blind because when we took it into the house it didn’t curl up in fear of the lights. It weighs about 500g, which means it is about four to six months old. It could have been abandoned by its mother.”

Only one in 10,000 hedgehogs are albino and this is one of a series of such animal seen in the Ashford area this year.

Albino squirrels have been reported on three occasions, in Wye in March and Shadoxhurst in March and October.

The couple met when he was paralysed in a car crash and she nursed him.

They met at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital spinal unit in 2002, where she worked, and married at St Nicholas Church, Pluckley, on April 26 this year.