The chairman of the parish council in a quiet village feared that his life was “in peril” when he was attacked by a businessman in a dispute over birds’ nests, a court was told.
Magistrates were shown mobile footage from the village of Church Fenton, North Yorkshire, in which Andrew Mason, 63, can be seen on the ground in front of a tree-cutting cherry picker as Chris Makin, 65, tries to drag him by his clothes and hair during an incident in April 2023.
Prosecutors at Harrogate magistrates’ court described how, before the footage begins, Makin had poked Mason in the face, knocking off his glasses, and then “thrown him to the floor in a kind of headlock”.
At one point, Makin appears to instruct his workmen to move the cherry picker forward as Mason is lying in front of it
ANDREW MASON/PA
In the video, Mason is seen lying