NAKED joggers have caused a stir after being seen running through the freezing Worcestershire countryside.

A driver making early morning deliveries has spotted the runners three times on Castlemorton Common, near Malvern.

At first, it was a middle-aged couple - but, by the third sighting, the nude jogging party had grown to six.

The barefaced cheek of the joggers - whose identities remain a mystery - has amused Ray Biggs, of Welland Post Office.

He has bread delivered every day at around 6.45am.

"One morning, the driver said he'd seen a couple of joggers going across the common stark naked, and I wasn't sure whether to believe him or not.

"But he saw them again the following week and then a third time, when there were half-a-dozen of them," said Mr Biggs.

A spokesman for the Wyvern Naturist Club, near Ledbury - which has more than 100 members - said the runners sounded like "hardy souls" to be jogging naked at this time of year.

"I suspect they're doing it independently. It could be members of a running club doing it for a bet," he said.

"They wouldn't be members of our club, because they use our site and it isn't usually that well-occupied from about September.

"It's open all the year round, but we are not masochists. The weather conditions aren't such that people want to strip off."

The sightings come as determined naked runner Steve Gough, aged 44, from Hampshire, tries to complete the 845-mile run from Land's End to John O' Groats, despite being arrested several times on the way.

The idea of naked runners dates back to the ancient Greeks and the original Greek Olympics. At Tything Barn, a naturist site near Pembroke, Wales, there is an annual fun run for people who enjoy casting off their clothes.

The website says there are some naturists "committed to extending their naturism beyond the confines of the club stockade and striking out with a unique sense of freedom for the great outdoors".

It says runners who have had the opportunity to combine their running with nakedness have found a feeling of freedom and tranquillity, which cannot be matched in any other way.

But a Worcester police spokesman saw it differently.

The naked joggers could face prosecution under four different laws - the Public Order Act, Common Law, the Vagrancy Act and the Town Police Clauses Act.