A jury has heard the first accounts given to police by two men who are accused of raping a woman - with both insisting that it was the woman who initiated sex.

She said she was sexually attacked by the two men in the town’s St Nicholas’ Gardens on June 29 last year just hours after meeting them.

Stuart Milne, 37, and Terry Parry, 30, who live at separate addresses in Bow Fell Road, Whitehaven, both deny rape.

Milne has also pleaded not guilty to a further sexual assault.

At Carlisle Crown Court, the jury yesterday heard read aloud a transcript of the men’s interviews with police after their arrest.

Milne, who said he worked as a taxi driver, described meeting the woman during a night out, and chatting to her about her boyfriend.

He said she told him her boyfriend would not have sex with her.

“I said, why would someone not want to have sex with you?”, Milne told the officers.

He went on to say that as they walked through town she agreed to go somewhere “quieter” with him, and that was when they went into St Nicholas Park.

When they got in there she asked him for sex, he said. Milne said that at the time he was not drunk, just merry.

His co-defendant Parry told police that while outside a pub earlier he too had heard the woman say her boyfriend did not want sex, and he expressed surprise.

Later, he followed Milne and the woman as they walked towards the park, hanging back to give them some privacy. When he went into the park, he said, he saw they were on the ground having sex.

That was when she asked him if he also wanted sex, he said.

“I thought.. game on, so I walked over,” said Parry, who explained that he had just split up with his girlfriend.

“I never forced it on her or anything like that.”

The trial continues.