An adventurous sheep somehow managed to negotiate its way down the steep and dangerous cliff face at the Chasms and got stuck on a ledge.

Fortunately it was spotted by those fishing on board the charter boat Gemini, including Derek Pitman, who took the photograph.

Skipper of the Gemini Bob Taylor phoned the coastguard and farmer Derek Cain.Coastguard duty officer Michael McDonald said the team from Port Erin reached the Chasms at 6pm the next day.

He said as they are surprisingly good at scaling cliffs.

’When we normally do sheep rescues we treat it as an exercise,’ he said. ’We do a full cliff rescue, we secure it and bring it up.

’The farmer was going to go down and we didn’t want that, it might have led to another incident. Domestic animals like cats and dogs we treat as people because of the emotive attachment.’

Once the coastguard team had pegged in ropes and lowered onto the ledge now came arguably the trickiest part of the operation: capturing the sheep!

’Sheep do not want be rescued,’ said Michael. The coastguard had to pin down the alarmed sheep - challenging on a small ledge - and then attach gear to hoist it up.

It took three and a half hours and by 9.30pm everyone was on safe ground.

The grateful farmer Derek Cain explained the sheep had ’eaten her way down’ and onto the ledge that is less inaccessible than it appears from the sea and is known as the fisherman’s ledge, because people fish off there. Once down, the sheep couldn’t scramble back up.

He thanked the coastguard and everyone who called about the intrepid sheep who it turns out was just hungry.

He said: ’The coastguard use it as a training exercise and do me a favour at the same time’.

He added it is impossible to fence off all his land not least because it’s national trust land and the public must have access.The sheep is back with her flock and ’perfectly healthy’.