To the visitor, Yarnfield appears the perfect antidote to big-city life. A 19th-century pub stands beside the green where children play on swings as a pensioner walks her Yorkshire terrier.

But yesterday a court was told how teenagers terrorised the Staffordshire village for months, breaking windows, drunkenly abusing locals and rampaging through gardens so that people grew too frightened to venture out at night. At the end of the hearing, the gang became the largest single group in England to receive anti-social behaviour orders.