THE co-owner of a large sporting and farming estate has been fined £20,000 after a great-grandfather died in an all-terrain vehicle on remote moorland.

Retired businessman James Gaffney was collecting dead game following one of the regular pheasant shoots on the Urra Estate on the North York Moors when he lost control of the vehicle as he drove down a slope on October 31 last year.

The sentencing at Darlington Magistrates Court follows the National Farmers’ Union and Country Landowners’ Association urging farmers not to be so cavalier towards health and safety after it emerged Yorkshire and the North East was the country’s worst agricultural accident blackspot.

The court heard that Mr Gaffney, a 78-year-old married father-ofthree, had not been wearing a seatbelt and suffered fatal head injuries.

Mr Gaffney, of Hutton Rudby, near Stokesley, had retired from running an industrial gas business and had previously worked as a beater on the estate’s shoots. He was found trapped in the vehicle later that day and was pronounced dead at the scene.

Prosecuting, the Health and Safety Executive said Malcolm Reeve, who bought the estate in 2004 after leasing the Upsall Castle Shoot, near Thirsk, for the previous nine years, was responsible for managing health and safety on the estate.

Mr Reeve, 63, of Chop Gate, was also ordered to pay £1,681 in costs.