BBC presenter had to walk over a mile after suffering heart attack alone in countryside

BBC presenter Iolo Williams has revealed he had to walk over a mile to get to safety after suffering a heart attack while he was on his own in the countryside.

The TV and radio star – who has been hosting shows such as Springwatch and Winterwatch since 2019 - had gone for a long run by himself when “like a bolt out of the blue” he got an “intense pain” under his sternum. He told the Mirror that he knew it was a heart attack.

“And I thought well, I can’t go down here!” he said. Williams didn’t have a phone with him so knew he had to make his own way for help – but his car was a mile and a half away.

“So I walked on, crouched a little bit every now and again when the pain got a little bit worse,” he explained. “Got to my car, phoned for an ambulance and they said it would be 90-odd minutes.”

As he was facing a long wait for the ambulance, the star’s wife took him to the hospital. He recovered and ended up having an operation to fit a stent, but in May revealed he'd had another health scare.

Williams was working on a new series and all of a sudden struggled to put on his seatbelt in the car he was travelling in. He was taken to the hospital where he was given liquid aspirin for an embolism, which the NHS explains is "a blocked artery caused by a foreign body, such as a blood clot or an air bubble".

He said it had gone around his body for six weeks before it “jammed” in a blood vessel, which left him temporarily paralysed.

Luckily, the TV presenter recovered and said he had “no long-term ill-effect whatsoever”.

Iolo Williams took time off work after scare

In May, Williams told fans he would have to miss Springwatch while he got better. "Unfortunately I can’t co-present @BBCSpringwatch this year," he said on X. "I had a stent inserted in April, which released a clot, that, this week, caused an embolysm (sic)."

He told BBC Radio Cymru earlier this year: "I had to miss out on Springwatch, I had three and a half weeks back home. After that, I thought I couldn’t stay at home any longer so I went back to work."

The TV star is now back at work.

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