TWO thieves will have time on their hands for the next 12 weeks after they were caught cycling through Acomb in the early hours with a stone sundial.

Police suspected something was wrong when they saw Richard Cook, 32, and John Melvyn Roy Medd, 43, making their getaway on bikes along the snicket by Hob Moor School shortly before 4am on May 28, one with the plinth and one with the timekeeper part of the garden ornament.

Steven Ovenden, prosecuting, said: “It was certainly a very heavy object for two men to be carrying around by bicycle.”

As police approached, Cook made off and was chased on foot through the sleeping suburb before he was caught. He jettisoned his part of the sundial, which was damaged. Medd was also arrested. When magistrates announced they intended to add a curfew to the thieves’ punishment, the men’s solicitor John Howard said they had been on curfews as bail conditions or because of a previous crime for “a long time”.

Noting that neither had offended since their arrest, magistrate Penny Curry, sitting with two colleagues, said: “The curfews appear to be working.”

The bench imposed new 12-week nightly curfews from 8pm to 8am on both thieves. Each was also ordered to do 12 months’ supervision and a nine-month drug rehabilitation course, and to pay £85 prosecution costs and £100 compensation to the sundial’s owner.

Cook and Medd, both of Tudor Road, Acomb, both pleaded guilty to stealing the sundial worth £200 from a house in Hob Moor Drive and Medd admitted stealing meat worth £12 from Sainsbury’s store in Blossom Street on April 15.