A WOMAN crashed a quad bike through a fence at a farm in the region and died after suffering acute heart failure.

Yvonne Brown, 54, from Lanarkshire, Scotland, was visiting her sister in West Rounton, near Northallerton, North Yorkshire, when the accident happened on May 29.

An inquest into her death heard that Mrs Brown was in poor health, which had begun to deteriorate in her late 20s due to heavy smoking.

Her sister, Linda Bandy, said Mrs Brown, who smoked about 20 cigarettes a day, suffered from emphysema and seemed her usual self on the day she died.

She said: "She seemed fine, she was normal. She wasn't healthy, but that was how she always was. She had to go on her nebuliser, then she coughed and lit another cigarette, and that was just her, that wasn't any different to how she was normally."

Coroner Michael Oakley, sitting, at Scarborough County Court, ruled that she had died of natural causes.

The inquest heard Mrs Brown was at her sister's farm with her partner when she decided to go into one of the fields on a quad bike after dinner, with her sister.

They completed one lap of the field and then Mrs Brown began a faster second lap.

Mrs Bandy told the court that she repeatedly told her sister to slow down, but she did not respond.

She said she thought her sister had said "I can't" but she could not remember.

She tried to reach over and pull her hand off the accelerator, but she could not reach and the next thing she remembered was lying on the ground with an injured leg after they had gone through the fence.

Mrs Brown was taken to the Friarage Hospital, in Northallerton, where she died.

A post-mortem examination found that she died of acute heart failure, ischaemic heart disease, coronary atherosclerosis, a fractured right femur and haemorrhaging due to the accident.

North Yorkshire Police Accident Investigation Unit officer Tim Alderson said there was nothing wrong with the quad bike and that excessive speed was not the cause of the accident.

Mr Oakley said that given the circumstances surrounding the accident and Mrs Brown's poor health, she died of natural causes.