The boss of Gale Common Motoparc was arrested then later released without charge while running a private hire day at the circuit. A police officer visited the track and ordered the site to be closed, citing Covid-19 lockdown rules. But when the track owner refused and tried to order the cop off the land, he was arrested and taken away – for obstructing a police officer.

He was later released and says he had an apology. His statement says:

Unfortunately today ONE police officer attended the track where we had a small group private hire like many tracks across the country, he took it upon himself to open the gates enter the track premises unlawfully jump out of his van and his exact words were “shut this place down now” i asked him politely to leave the premises which he refused saying he had received complaints that we are not social distancing and shouldn’t be open, after asking several times for him to leave he created a scene and I was arrested.

The officer PC749 claimed I was obstructing a police officer, by doing what I don’t know and neither does the police force in York where i was taken. After looking at the police video evidence I was very quickly released with no charges and an apology, it came to light that Police officer is very familiar with the area and has interest in the Eggborough village. In the meantime more police had arrived and confirmed we was ok to open and the riders were all abiding by the government guidelines.

We are taking this down the route of harassment, after seeing the local councillors post this evening stating that hopefully today will go as a police incident and it will go against our planning application. It’s quite clear their complaints once again were to create a bad image for us.

We feel they are using this pandemic as an excuse to go in their favour how low can they go. We must say there are so many people in the village that support us and we are grateful for that they know we are respectable people and we are only trying to run a business. We hope the locals come on here and see that we are not unreasonable we are willing to meet with people and show our plans, we are not going anywhere we have planning permission, we have full permission to run our business as we already do we just have new exciting plans

Just to give you all a bit of background over the past year we have been struggling with a very small amount of local villagers who do not want our track to operate.

As many of you know when taking on the track we had so many plans to make our facility one of the best around but since our planning application went in every time our track opens we receive a noise complaint through the environmental health.

We are only trying to make a good facility for people who enjoy the motorcross sport , we have created jobs for young local people, we have brought trade to the local shops and pubs. We run our days within social hours, we are not bad neighbours as we are labelled frequently by the councillor.

We are taking legal action and currently still fighting for our plans to make this track even better for you guys and a good business for myself and my family.