A two-year-old girl escaped a potentially fatal injury after a pencil pierced her eye socket and came within a millimetre of puncturing a major blood vessel in her brain.

Wren Bowell was getting ready for bed when she fell over and the pencil she was carrying penetrated her right eye socket and lodged itself 1.5in into the front lobe of her brain.

The little girl, from Peasedown St John, near Bath, was rushed to Frenchay Hospital in Bristol where neurosurgeons operated on her for four hours, opening up her skull so that the pencil could be removed.

"She is extremely lucky and we are very pleased that she has made such an excellent recovery," said Ian Pople, the neurosurgeon who operated on her.

"It is every parent's nightmare for a child to fall on something like this, it does happen from time to time but it is rare," he added.