A VALE couple were woken suddenly in the early hours of Sunday when they thought they heard an explosion downstairs. Alex Williams and girlfriend Dale Langlois found a large piece of granite had been thrown through the double-glazed window of their front door.

‘I’ve been around the world and in the military so I’ve seen a lot, but we were petrified,’ said Mr Williams, 30.

‘I thought there was a fire downstairs and it was probably worse because we were both in a deep sleep.’

He added that the rock must have been thrown with a lot of force to create such a bang.

The incident, which happened shortly after 1am, was one of about 20 cases of vandalism reported in the area that night.

Mr Williams said that as he turned the light on, he heard a vehicle being driven away. The couple had had an open fire downstairs during the evening and initially wondered if that had caused the bang. Climbing from bed, Mr Williams saw glass all over his hall and a big lump of granite sitting in the middle of it.

‘Your mind races at the time and we wondered if anybody was hanging around outside.’

Mr Williams had arrived back from a four-day business trip to Aberdeen that day and he was relieved he had.

‘I think Dale would have been even more frightened had I not been there.’

Making a replacement double-glazed unit will cost £120. The cost of the excess on the house insurance policy and the loss of the no claims bonus meant Mr Williams was better off fitting it himself. He said he was lucky that he could.

‘The only consolation we have got is that there were other incidents reported in the area in the same night, which meant they weren’t just targeting us.’

A man living nearby who did not want to be named had rocks thrown at the front of his house, one of which broke a large window.

‘They need to introduce appropriate legislation that will make the law a deterrent against this type of behaviour,’ he said.

A police spokesman said yesterday that enquiries into the spate of incidents were continuing.