Astonishing footage has emerged of seven people, including three children, being plucked from a cliff ledge after being trapped by dangerous surf.

The Batemans Bay Unit of the NSW State Emergency Service said it was called to rocks near the North Head campground, south of Durras on the NSW South Coast, on Sunday morning, to find four adults and three children clinging to the narrow cliff.

“[They] were hiking around the water’s edge and became trapped by the high tide along with a rather large swell. They managed to climb up to a ledge about 10 metres above the waves to await rescue,” the unit said in a post on Facebook on Wednesday.

But, as the waves got higher and more powerful, the group was left clinging to a rocky cliff face with nowhere to go.

They raised the alert and the Westpac Rescue Helicopter was sent to the scene. But it was deemed too dangerous to try to winch the group from the cliff face.

Eurobodalla SES commander Peter Collins said emergency responders knew immediately it wasn’t going to be “an ordinary rescue”.

“This was a very, very dangerous situation. They were so close to the waves breaking at the bottom and I thought, gosh, if a huge wave comes in, it’s going to wash them straight off and they’d be gone,” he told News.com.au

“The chopper would have just blown them off the cliff face.”

A specialist team took more than three hours to rescue the group from their narrow cliff ledge. Photos: Batemans Bay SES Unit

Instead, a “vertical rescue team” was called in. They set up a special frame at the top of the cliff, before lowering one of their most experienced team members down to the stranded group.

“Slowly, one by one, the [group was] extracted to the top of the cliff by us lowering a NSW SES team member 40 metres down a cliff face to hook up a casualty, to then be hauled back up to the top,” the Batemans Bay SES post said.

Collins said the youngest of the stranded walkers was lifted up first, in a delicate rescue operation that took more than three hours.

“They were actually quite calm, but when they started raising them, they were quite white-knuckled,” he told News.com.au.

“We took them one by one and had set up our own first aid station while the ambulance was on the way.

“Other than a few scrapes, there were thankfully no serious injuries.”

Batemans Bay SES said the walkers were “tired and cold, but in good spirits and very glad to be back on high ground” at the end of their ordeal.