Leeds City Council staff recently bulldozed away the mountain bike track to the north of Stairfoot Lane. Subsequently, Your correspondent was invited to a attend a site meeting to discuss the track. Before attending the meeting, your correspondent canvassed the opinion of the FOAW mailing list, and it would be fair to say that the overwhelming view of those on the list was in favour of the existence of the bike track or at least had a live and let live attitude.
The meeting took place today, 1 March 2013. Your correspondent attended and met a member of the council staff, the three City councillors for Alwoodley, a City councillor for Adel and local landowners.
It was explained that the bike track had been removed by the council for health and safety reasons. The validity of those reasons were discussed and your correspondent passed on the views of FOAW – giving Councillor Harrand a copy of the emails your correspondent had received.
It would be fair to say that the general view of the meeting was in favour of the existence of the bike track – as somewhere for people to get out and engage in healthy physical activity. It will be interesting to see how things develop.
There are two footnotes.
Firstly, your correspondent found at the remains of the bike track a note from a dog walker to the bikers suggesting that Friends of Adel Woods were responsible for the removal of the bike track. This is simply untrue and the result of an overactive imagination.
Secondly, if you have been to the track and seen some new wooden stakes in the land, these are apparently there to mark out the boundary of the land owned by Leeds City Council.
Friends of Adel Woods 
As a parent of one of the bikers, we are all very grateful to Friends of Adel Woods and Adel Association for all your help in convincing the Leeds city council that these trails are of no harm, although the health and safety part is something we can work on with warning signs at the path entrances maybe? It’s nice to know that local community groups are in favour of these trails, and all the people who use them are aware of what has been done behind the scenes, which makes them respect the area even more.
This is a really sad reflection of local governments today. The H&S Act is being misused in this context. Are you going to saw all the trees down too in case the kids climb them?? A responsible and caring council would have liaised and worked with the creative groups which built these bike trails to help make them meet safety standards with appropriate signage, as seen at various trail centers around the country, all of which have obvious dangers without being a health and safety liability to their official sponsors/owners.