Four cooling towers which have dominated the skyline for half a century have been demolished in a spectacular series of explosions.

The 300ft stacks of Chapelcross nuclear power station in Dumfriesshire were blown up at 9am on Sunday, crashing to the ground in just a few seconds.

Hundreds of onlookers turned out to watch the event, which was also broadcast live on the internet.

The towers have been major landmarks in the south west of Scotland for nearly 50 years, and are also visible from the Cumbrian coast.

A 650ft exclusion zone was set up around the towers, with several road closures also put in place. Around 400 cars owned by people who came to watch were parked up outside the zone, police said.

More than 1,500 individual explosive charges had been drilled into the four stacks before being set off fractions of seconds apart.

They were exploded from the bases upwards to ensure the structures tumbled into themselves.

The blasts - which were heralded by a massive horn blast - produced a massive cloud of debris that took several minutes to clear.

Just the caved-in remains of one of the stack's walls was all that was visible afterwards.

More than 25,000 tonnes of steel and concrete rubble were produced by the explosions, which collected in 10ft deep circular wells underneath. The material would all be recycled.