A JUDGE has stopped a naturist from stripping off in public after hearing how he exposed himself to children.

Schoolgirls fled when they saw Terence Morgan’s activities as he stood stark naked by a children’s playground, said Adrian Strong, prosecuting.

York Crown Court heard Morgan had gone to Homestead Park in Clifton in the briefest of shorts and then stripped off completely.

Police officers had warned him to behave himself the previous day after he exposed himself at the window of his Clifton home on one of this summer’s few sunny weekends.

Morgan told police he was a naturist who liked sunbathing in the nude and got “sexually excited by the sun”.

Now the serial flasher, who had 12 previous convictions for indecent exposure, is starting 12 months in jail.

“Your activity was that of an exhibitionist... and you obtained an extra frisson doing that activity by the knowledge that people were there to see you at it,” Judge Shaun Spencer told Morgan.

In an unusual move, he made a sexual offences prevention order banning Morgan from appearing in public unless he was clothed from the waist downwards.

“If his clothes are on he is not an exhibitionist,” the judge said.

Morgan, 48, of Lucas Avenue, Clifton, York, pleaded guilty to two charges of engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child aged under 13. He was also disqualified from working with children and put on the sex offenders’ register for ten years.

Mr Strong said that two friends aged ten and 12 went for a picnic and to play in one of the playgrounds in Homestead Park, on the Sunday of the Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend.

But then they saw Morgan watching them in the bushes and saw what he was doing. He started walking towards them and they fled to tell one of their mothers, who contacted police.

David Hall,mitigating, said Morgan had run up “considerable debts” and as a result had slipped back into his old habits.

He had feared he would be victimised and put under surveillance when police visited his home on the Saturday.