A 52-YEAR-OLD Devizes man who had more than 1,500 images of child pornography stored on his computers has been jailed for 15 months.

Thomas Farrington was being investigated for other matters when police found a catalogue of sickening images of young girls, often in a distressed state, engaged in perverted sex acts with adults and animals.

Farrington, of no fixed abode, pleaded guilty to twelve charges of making indecent images of a child between November 2002 and March last year. He also admitted a charge of possessing indecent images of children on March 18 last year, when he was arrested.

Ian Fenny, prosecuting, told Swindon Crown Court this week: "His home was searched and two computers were seized. On the first computer a large amount of child pornography was found in the temporary internet caches. Officers found 1,238 indecent images of children along with evidence of thousands of visits to websites.

"On the second machine they found 319 indecent pictures of children, some of which were stored in folders created by him."

Simon Burns, defending, said that his client was wheelchair bound as a result of an accident at work more than 20 years ago.

"You can only imagine the shame, upset and shock he has caused to his family," he said.

He said Farrington had only been looking at the pictures and had not distributed them or saved them to disc. "This was a very private activity committed by a man in a wheelchair who was not having a particularly happy time. Curiosity got the better of him," he said.

Judge Tom Longbotham said: "This has been referred to as a trade in young children and it is. These young children are very seriously sexually abused. Not only are they treated in this way, what happens to them is viewed by vast numbers of people. The more people that view them the more it will happen and repeat itself again."