Bumper crowds enjoyed a three-day hot air ballooning extravaganza at Longleat House over the weekend.

Now in its fourth year, Sky Safari welcomed tens of thousands of visitors to Longleat's parkland estate near Warminster.

Sky Safari is Europe’s largest annual hot air balloon event and attracts pilots from as far afield as the USA, United Arab Emirates and Lithuania with more than 170 individual teams and 200 balloons taking part.

The three-day event set a series of new records including the largest number balloons to take part in a mass launch in the UK, with 172 taking off on Saturday, and the biggest night glow in the UK, featuring 84 balloons.

Longleat's Steve Mytton said: “The Sky Safari is growing in popularity each year and it’s rapidly establishing itself as one of the biggest events of its kind worldwide.

“The calibre of pilot and the sheer range of hot air balloons we are able to attract means our visitors get to see the very best of the best and we’re already excited to see what next year has to offer."

The star of this year’s event was Adelaide, a giant koala, which took to the skies to celebrate the opening of Longleat’s new Koala Creek home to a group of the iconic Australian marsupials.

Adelaide was part of an aerial ‘Safari Park’ which also featured Simbaloo the lion, a cheetah called Duma, a panther, Wes the wolf, a fox, a parrot, an owl and a guinea pig.

More than 30 other special shaped hot air balloons made an appearance over the weekend; either flying or taking part in tethered displays.

They included everything from an inflatable recreation of the Brandenburg Gate, a giant emoji and a full-sized version of the famous animated balloon from Walt Disney’s Up.

Longleat partnered with Exclusive Ballooning of Berkeley in Gloucestershire, to put on the event.

It attracted current and former hot air balloon world champions from Japan, USA and UK competitions.

Andrew Holly, managing director of Exclusive Ballooning, said: "The weekend was absolutely fantastic. It could not have gone better really.

"We had 743 flights over the weekend and, for the first time, we had three world champions on the podium."

The winning pilot was twice world champion John Petrehn, of the USA, while Dominic Bareford of the UK finished second. In third place was Yudai Fujita of Japan.