MORE than 50 firefighters attended three blazes across Oxfordshire that broke out within hours of each other on Tuesday.

In just seven hours fire crews were called to a children’s summer camp after gas cylinders caught fire, dealt with a suspected arson at a service station hotel and tackled a blaze tearing through 250 tonnes of hay bales.

More than 50 firefighters in total attended the incidents, which are not being linked, half of them going to the hay bale fire in Vents Farm, Forest Hill, which started at just after 10pm.

Smoke from the fire could be seen two miles away and there were concerns that the flames could spread to other barns and a thatched cottage next door. The fire service praised the “quick actions” of a neighbour alerting them to the blaze.

Crews were still at the scene last night as the flames died down.

A few hours earlier, at just after 7pm, they were called to a fire in a store room a few miles away at the Days Inn, at Oxford services, just off the M40 ner Wheatley.

This fire is being treated as arson and Thames Valley Police are investigating.

Earlier in the day, three adult supervisors and 16 children between the ages of seven and 11 on a camping trip with the Bushcraft Company in the Wychwood Forest had to be evacuated from a site between Lefield and Shorthampton shortly after 3pm, when gas cylinders in a shower unit caught fire.

Bushcraft Company’s operations director Julian Penny, 39, said: “There were a number of children in the showers and one of them saw a flame and so the staff immediately took the kids out the shower to an area of safety. The children weren’t in any danger.”