A fly tipper has been found guilty of dumping building waste on Dartmoor after a farmer turned detective to track him down.

Connor Calam ran a skip hire company in Plymouth but took at least one truck load of waste 30 miles to the outskirts of Okehampton where he left it in a muddy lane that led to three fields.

Farmer Courtney Heard was so upset by his access to his land at Pudson Farm, off Hatherleigh Road, Okehampton, being blocked that he rifled through the rubbish and traced where it had come from.

He found receipts made out to a building firm named Zenith from merchants in Newton Abbot and South Molton buried among old bits of timber and plasterboard.

He alerted the Environment Agency who discovered that Zenith had paid Calam’s Plymouth Skip Hire £245 to take it to an authorised site.

The company were left another £500 out of pocket after agreeing to pay to have it removed, even though the fly tipping was not their fault.

Calam, aged 21, of Seaview Avenue, Plymouth, denied two counts of disposing of controlled waste at Pudson Farm, Okehampton between December 12, 2016 and February 27, 2017.

He was found guilty of one charge and cleared of the other, which related to a skip load of rubbish from a family home in Moretonhampstead.

Judge Mr Peter Ralls, QC, adjourned sentence so he could find out more about a previous case at Plymouth Crown Court, in which Calam received a suspended sentence for dangerous driving.

He said that if the fly-tipping case stood on its own he would be considering a fine, compensation and costs.

During the two day case at Exeter Crown Court the jury heard how more than one batch of waste was dumped in the farm gateway.

Some was from Torbay-based building firm Zenith, who paid Calam’s Plymouth Skip Hire £245 to remove it from a job they were doing in Plymouth.

Calam denied dumping any rubbish and said he had taken the Zenith waste to an Okehampton-based operator named John Blyth. He did not have any paper work to confirm his story.

Mr Blyth told the jury he had never seen the Zenith waste and his only involvement with Calam was to sell him 15 skips in late 2016, one of which contained rubbish from the house in Moretonhampstead which was later found dumped