Travellers who arrived on Harpenden Common yesterday afternoon have now left.

Harpenden Town Council received reports on Monday that travellers had parked approximately 20 vehicles on the land.

The council visited the site and carried out an assessment with colleagues from the police.

They decided to instruct enforcement bailiffs to serve a direction to leave notice, meaning that if they did not leave by this morning bailiffs would be able to use reasonable force to remove the vehicles from site.

They left the site at around 10pm last night with the police following.

Contractors have been on site early this morning to clear up.

A spokesperson for the council said: "Whilst we are pleased that we have been able to resolve this issue quickly, it is important to make residents aware that unfortunately there are only limited options that we have when dealing with unauthorised encampments.

"Those options do not guarantee that we can remove people from the site immediately.

"This is the same for the police whose powers require specific criteria to be met.

"By instructing bailiffs we have dealt with the encampment using common law rather than go through a court process which is often much lengthier.

"Whilst the responsibility for moving on the travellers has fallen to us as landowners, we are once again grateful to Sgt Jordon Fox and his colleagues from the local neighbourhood police team for assisting us."