A motorcyclist was seriously hurt at 5.40pm on Sunday. West Mercia wants dashcam footage, and our own DfT figures show the A4137 five-year record.
West Mercia Police are asking drivers who used the A4137 on Sunday evening to check their dashcam footage. A motorcyclist was seriously injured on the road at Marstow, about four miles south west of Ross-on-Wye, at around 5.40pm on Sunday 20 September.
The force’s appeal, published on 21 September, says a motorbike was travelling along the A4137 when it collided with a campervan and a car. The rider was taken to hospital with serious injuries.
Officers want to hear from anyone who saw the collision, and from anyone who saw the motorbike in the moments before it. They have also asked to review any relevant dashcam footage. The contact given in the statement is the investigating officer, at daniel.barker1@westmercia.police.uk.
Dashcams overwrite themselves, usually on a loop of a few hours or a few days. If you drove that stretch on Sunday afternoon or evening, the footage is worth saving now rather than later.
What the A4137 has cost in five years
Hereford Today has gone through the Department for Transport’s road casualty statistics for the five years from 2021 to 2025, and filtered them to the A4137 inside Herefordshire. Over that period the road recorded:
- 21 injury collisions
- 30 casualties
- one person killed, four seriously injured and 25 slightly injured
The collisions are spread evenly across the five years: five in 2021, four in 2022, five in 2023, four in 2024 and three in 2025. Two of the 21 involved a motorcycle.
That is a modest count for an A road, and it matters for how this weekend’s collision is read. The A4137 is not a road with a visible pattern of motorcycle crashes. What the county’s figures do show is how badly motorcyclists come off when a collision happens at all.
Across the whole county over those five years there were 1,522 injury collisions and 2,085 casualties, of whom 42 were killed and 463 seriously injured.
Motorcyclists accounted for 224 of those 2,085 casualties, about one in nine. But they accounted for 14 of the 42 people killed and 101 of the 463 seriously injured. One in three of the people who died on Herefordshire’s roads in those five years was on a motorbike.
West Mercia Police published its own version of that arithmetic on 14 September, launching Operation Spotlight. The force said that in the past year 55 people were killed and 486 seriously injured on the roads of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, and that 12% of those collisions involved someone aged 17 to 24.
Two things to keep in mind about the DfT figures. They count only collisions reported to the police in which somebody was injured, so damage-only crashes are missing entirely. And the most recent year is revised later, so 2025 may move.
What it means for you
If you drove the A4137 near Marstow on Sunday afternoon or evening:
- check your dashcam before the footage is overwritten
- email daniel.barker1@westmercia.police.uk if you have anything, including footage that shows the motorbike earlier in its journey
- you do not have to have seen the collision itself to be useful
If you were not, the practical point is the one the county’s five-year record makes. A motorcyclist is far more likely to be killed or seriously hurt in a collision than anyone else on the road, and in Herefordshire it happens on rural roads. Of the 223 injury collisions involving a motorcycle, 159 were in a rural area and 133 were on an A road. Every one of the 15 fatal ones was rural, and 11 of those were on an A road.
Our Hereford roadworks and travel page carries the current closures and disruption across the county.
West Mercia Police published this appeal on 21 September. We were unable to reach the force’s website on 22 September to check for an update, so if the appeal has changed since it was published, that is not reflected here.
Have your say