A FREE community bus service which takes elderly shoppers to an out-of-town supermarket has made its last journey after store bosses withdrew funding.

The twice-weekly Stagecoach service, which takes shoppers from Feniscowles to Asda in Clayton Green had been used by around 30 pensioners.

Asda said the decision was "regrettable" but said they had been left with no choice because falling passenger numbers meant it was no longer viable.

Alison Hanford, general manager at the store, said the company might consider running the service once a week if it could sustain a higher number of users.

But passengers and the driver of the bus say the service, which picks up in the Feniscowles, Green Lane and Mill Hill areas is still well used.

Miss Hanford said: "We have wholly-subsidised this service for a number of years but recently passenger numbers have dwindled.

"More of our elderly customers are now using our home shopping services and our free bus service is not getting the uptake it once did and that means we are not able to fund the bus into the new year.

"I have spoken to the bus driver in store and looked into the provision of a bus to the Blackburn store, which is much closer to Feniscowles than Clayton Green, but that was not an offer the customers wanted.

"It is not that we are not sympathetic, we just no longer have the numbers to carry on using the bus."

Bus driver Ann Martland, 60, who has driven the same route for the last 20 years, said: "I have been driving customers to Asda since the store opened around five years ago and so this news is just heartbreaking.

"They say there are not enough customers but the bus is regularly full and sometimes I have had to get a bigger bus just to fit everyone on."

Regular passenger Peter Robbins, 62, of Livesey Branch Road, said: "I go to Asda to get my shopping and I just prefer the Clayton Green one. I like to have a drive out on the bus and avoid all the congestion around Blackburn.

"There's usually about 30 people catch this bus, a lot of them much older then me and in their 90s. We are all friends because we have been catching the bus for so long and will be devastated to see it go.

"We just hope we can come up with something else, rather than us all having to shop on our own."