A children's sports facility has received a thorough spring clean after a mother's comments on its untidy state sparked a community litter pick.

Around fifteen volunteers set to work at the Ball Park on the Redcastle Furze estate in Thetford on Monday to clean up the park and its surrounding area.

The community effort was prompted by Claire Germeney, who commented on the Thetford Forum Facebook page about the untidy state of the park.

The mother of five will soon be moving to the estate and brought her children to look at the ball park, but they found it strewn with litter.

'My children are aged between four and 12 so they are the prime age for using this facility, but they said it was really dirty and they wouldn't want to play there, which kind of defeats the object of having it,' she said.

'But there are a lot of people who care. If there's a group of you working together it doesn't take long to tidy it up.

'People are always ready to criticise about things like this, but there is no point complaining if you're not willing to do anything about it.'

Terry Jermy, mayor of Thetford, was taking part in the litter pick today. He is also a trustee of the Thetford Community Association, which helped to get the £120,000 ball park built in 2003 and still maintains it, at a cost of around £4,000 a year.

'A lot of people don't realise it's the community association which runs it. It's maintained pretty much wholly by volunteers,' he said.

Of the event's advertising on Facebook, he said: 'Social media is great for rallying people. Someone harmlessly posted up a photo of the state of the site and said, let's do something about it. And look at how many people have turned out.'

Barbara Bysouth, community fly-tipping officer, was also helping out.

'This has been organised in one day and we have had a really good turn-out. The residents are talking about starting to do a regular litter pick on the estate, so something really positive has come out of it,' she said.