A TREASURED garden bench given as a 60th birthday present and stolen in a suspected drunken prank was found being used as extra seating at a nearby bus stop.

Alex Rivers, of Abingdon, said she was devastated to find the seat gone because it was a present from her late mother, who died last year.

She and her husband David returned to their home in Summerfields from a weekend away on Sunday, April 26, to find it had vanished.

Then they got a call from police on Saturday(MAY2) night to say it had been spotted 10 minutes away at a bus stop on Radley Road, Abingdon.

Mrs Rivers, a retired school secretary and mother-of-two, said: “I couldn’t believe it.

“It’s totally brazen.

“They would have had to have walked up the front garden and taken the bench from outside our front door.

“Police thought it was just a prank.”

The bench had been in their back garden for two years and they only moved it to by the front door three weeks ago.

And Mrs had only just re-stained it.

She added: “It is a very treasured possession. It’s not exciting, but it’s sentimental like you wouldn’t believe.”

The couple left at about 8.30am on the Saturday morning and returned the following afternoon.

Their lodger said the bench was definitely still there on Saturday afternoon, so Mrs Rivers said: “I think it must have been late Saturday night, a drunk prank or something.”

Mrs Rivers’s mother Elizabeth Richardson, of Wolvercote, gave her the wooden seat to her daughter as a birthday present two years ago.

She said her mother was an “amazing woman and a formidable lady”.

Mrs Richardson worked for social services as a home-case organiser for years until her early 70s. She died last February aged 85, Mrs Rivers said, but she added that her mother would be well-known by a lot of people.

Mrs Rivers worked at Manor Prep School, Abingdon, for 15 years where her husband is still the maintenance man.

She said a woman who lives near the bus stop called police to say she had spotted the bench, which has been returned.