A man has been jailed for five and a half years for carrying out a 17-year campaign of abuse against a woman and young children.

During the abuse Michael Pryde inflicted a horrifying injury to a three-year-old boy and forced another youngster to stand in a circle of Lego blocks and beat him if he stepped outside them.

A judge told the 42-year-old that only a bully and coward would have acted as he had done.

Lord Uist said at the High Court in Edinburgh: "The violence employed by you was particularly nasty, involving compression of the throat of three of the victims."

The judge told Pryde that there were "elements of deliberate cruelty" in the violence that he had perpetrated, adding: "You have shown no remorse."

Lord Uist jailed him for five years after he was found guilty of assaulting the woman, two boys and a girl.

The judge sentenced him to a further six months imprisonment for breaching bail twice.

Pryde, of McDonald Park, Balbeggie, in Perthshire, carried out the violence and intimidation against victims at houses in Perth between 1997 and 2014.

He had denied a string of offences during his trial but was found guilty of several charges.

The court heard one young boy was forced to stand inside a circle of Lego bricks that Pryde built, sometimes on one leg, and was hit if he failed to comply or stepped outside the blocks.

Pryde was also found guilty of assaulting and verbally abusing a girl who was seized by the neck, slapped, shouted and sworn at.

The joiner, who has a previous conviction for assault, was acquitted of a charge of raping a woman while filming it by camcorder at a house in Perth in the summer of 2006 after supplying her with drugs.

Defence counsel Tony Lenehan told the court that Pryde maintained his innocence despite being convicted.

He said Pryde was "not by any means a habitual offender" and added: "He was a hard working man, a successful, self-employed craftsman.

"This will be his first prison sentence and the last he tells me."

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