A couple who set out to cycle from Cumbria to the Great Wall of China have been forced to postpone the rest of their trip – after one of them suffered a freak accident.

Peter and Chris Lloyd, of Hallbankgate, near Brampton, were forced to return home after biking all the way to Hungary before disaster struck.

A slip on wet tiles after a relaxing bath has left Peter, 64, with a large metal plate and screws in his leg.

While he is frustrated, he said it won’t stop them completing the adventure.

His recovery is expected to take between four to six months.

Once he has fully recovered, he and his wife Chris aim to set out to finish the challenge they started back in January.

After stopping off for a couple of days break from cycling the couple went to try some thermal baths near to where they were staying in Sopron.

“It seemed like a good idea to do that after 2,000 kilometres cycling,” said Peter. “After about an hour we decided we’d had enough.”

When he came to get out of the bath he slipped on wet tiles. “It hurt a lot,” he said. “I just slipped. It wasn’t a very dramatic accident at all.

“If I’d come down on any other part of me I might have been fine, but I came down on my hip and it was far from fine.

“It wasn’t a cycling accident. This is what’s so annoying,” Peter said.

Until that point it had been a successful trip.

They made their way from Birdoswald Roman Fort on Hadrian’s Wall to Newcastle, where they caught the ferry to the Netherlands.

Despite a cold spell there, Peter and Chris were happy to see that all the cycle routes were good surfaces and maintained.

They then travelled through Germany – where they hit a patch of black ice.

But they dusted themselves down and headed to Austria and Slovakia before reaching Hungary and following what is known as the Iron Curtain Trail.

“We haven’t cut our trip short. We’ve got a gap in the middle of it and we’re going to continue,” said Peter.

“I feel absolutely fed up about it, I feel cross about it and I feel a bit silly because of this silly accident. It’s unplanned but we are determined to continue. Life, sometimes, you just don’t know what it has in store for you.”

They are now considering their options – whether to pick up where they left off in Sopron or to start again in Cumbria in October.

They got the bug for bicycle touring when they cycled home from Greece in 2015. But the sheer scale of their latest expedition is in another league.

Throughout the challenge, which they called Wall to Wall, Peter and Chris expect to cover about 40 miles a day and between 8,000 and 10,000 miles in total, visiting about a dozen countries before they reach China’s iconic landmark.