FIREFIGHTERS spent an hour supporting the body of a severely injured elderly woman as she was cut free from the mangled wreck of her overturned car.

Fire station manager Chris Wilson, from Rewley Road in Oxford, has described the aftermath of the car smash at a notorious blackspot near Witney.

The collision happened on the A415 on Wednesday afternoon - just 125m from where a 21-year-old man from Oxford was killed on Saturday.

Mr Wilson and his crew arrived to find that the driver of a Peugeot 406 had managed to pull himself out of his battered car, but the woman was trapped in her Peugeot 206 which had overturned in a ditch.

He said: "The car was precariously positioned upside down, 10ft below the road in a ditch and in a foot of freezing water.

"We put two firefighters into the car so they could support her and take the weight off the seatbelt which was digging into her chest and stomach."

It was an hour before the woman - who is thought to be in her 60s - could be extracted from her car. She was taken to the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford.

Mr Wilson said: "The scene of this latest collision was in sight of police signs stating 'Fatal accident here on Saturday'."

At 8.30am on that day, 21-year-old James Franklin, of Monmouth Road, Oxford, was driving his Renault Clio when he was involved in a collision with a Ford Transit van.

He later died at the John Radcliffe Hospital as a result of his injuries - making him the fifth person to die on that stretch of road in three years.

There have been 53 deaths on the county's road this year - 13 more than last year.

Mr Wilson advised people to visit www.365alive.co.uk, a campaign set up to save 365 lives on the roads over a ten-year period.