POLICE spent an hour talking a "vulnerable" young man down from the roof of a 40ft house in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Gloucestershire Police were called after a resident spotted the 18-year-old, from Lydney, with a knife at 3.45am in the grounds of The Dean Academy. A search of the town and the school grounds were carried out before police tracked him down and followed him towards Station Road in Lydney.

The man climbed onto the roof of a building and a negotiator was called in by police to talk him down. Fire crews and an ambulance also attended the scene as the young man spent more than half an hour coming down and then going back up onto the roof.

A local homeowner said: "I was awoken by a loud crash and thought it must have been cats or something but it was him scrambling on our roof. The man must have come over our rear fence and climbed onto our single storey roof over the kitchen before climbing onto next door's roof to eventually reach the top. There was a lot of police outside and we didn't get involved as we could see there was a lot going on. The man damaged our gate post, fence and roof in the process which is annoying as we will have to pay for it to be fixed."

The man eventually came down at 5.05am and police detained him under the Mental Health Act. He was taken to Wotton Lawn Hospital in Gloucester for assessment.