Video: Watch freak moment 10m high whirlwind whips through Yorkshire village

The rare phenomenon was caught on camera in Rossington, near Doncaster, on Thursday (August 10), with the whirling funnel of dust lasting a couple of minutes.

13-year-old Ethan Cunningham was at the village’s skate park with a friend when he captured the whirlwind – known as a dust devil - on camera in a short clip.

His dad Oliver said: “The council turned up thinking it was a fire but it wasn't. Very odd, thought it would be cool for people to see. My son only recorded two seconds of it.”

The clip was filmed at around 4pm on Thursday, with the height of the whirlwind estimated at around 10 metres.

Dust devils are strong, well-formed but relatively short-lived whirlwinds, ranging from small (half a metre wide and a few metres tall) to large (more than 10 m wide and more than 1 km tall).

Dust devils are usually harmless, but can on rare occasions grow large enough to pose a threat to both people and property.

They are comparable to tornadoes in that both are a weather phenomenon involving a vertically oriented rotating column of wind and form as a swirling updraft under sunny conditions during fair weather, rarely coming close to the intensity of a tornado.

In February this year, dozens of homes and properties in Thorne suffered severe damage after a ‘mini-tornado’ ripped through gardens as Storm Franklin battered Doncaster hot on the heels of Storm Eunice.