Spooky spindle spinner

I was recently asked to call to a neighbour’s garden to see if I could identify a garden pest.

Now this is something that I often do and as I went up, I was expecting to find a plague of greenfly, or some other aphid.

What I found was something that I had never seen before. It was like a scene from Arachnaphobia or a Harry Potter movie. A tree about 5 metres high and with a spread of about 4 metres was covered in what looked like a giant spider’s web.