A CUMBRIAN rugby league club has appealed for support after £5,000 worth of damage was done at a festival event last weekend. 

Cockermouth Titans celebrated their annual Titans Fest event, which is fully run by volunteers, on Saturday, June 24 - but saw profits wiped out after an act of mindless vandalism. 

Lawsons Haulage had loaned the club a curtain-sided wagon for the festival but when volunteers arrived to clean up on Sunday morning, they discovered that the curtain had been slashed. 

Club captain Regan Tinnion said: "We went up Sunday morning to clean up stuff and found that it was like that.

"There were volunteers up there until 11 at night so it has happened in the early hours of the morning.

"It’s obviously a massive cost for us. It’s a new curtain but Lawsons Haulage donate it to us every year as a gesture.

"They’re now having to hire a wagon while that one is out of use, so it’s a loss of earnings for them. It’s a bit of a nightmare really.”

The club are appealing for support on JustGiving, and have already raised more than £2,000 of their target, with any excess funds to be donated to the charities Bee Unique and State of Mind.

Mr Tinnion said: "It’s going well at the minute, hopefully, it keeps going and we can get to the target in the next week or so. Anything over that and we will donate to the two charities."

While it was hoped that the club's CCTV cameras would help to discover a culprit, the images have not proved to be any use to the club or the police.

Mr Tinnion added: "We haven’t been able to capture anyone on the CCTV. We reported it to the police but without CCTV they couldn’t do much.

"They’ve said that if you get any information, let us know, but there’s nothing they could really do with the information we gave them."

You can donate to Cockermouth Titans' JustGiving page here