TOURISM bosses have been left stumped by Google after the country’s second largest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty was left off their maps.

Staff from the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty Partnership (NP AONB Partnership) have been trying to contact the company for more than four months after realising the beauty hotspot had vanished from the online map.

Thousands of visitors make their way to the area, located between the National Parks of the Yorkshire Dales and Northumberland, every year with many relying on Google Maps to find local amenities and directions.

However, the beauty spot, which is one of the most remote places in England, with its distinctive high moorland and broad upland dales, could see a dip in income from visitors simply because they cannot find it.

This is despite neighbouring AONBS, including Nidderdale and the Northumberland Coast, being clearly shown.

Chris Woodley-Stewart, director of the NP AONB Partnership, said he could not understand why all of the National Parks and most other AONBS are marked out on Google Maps, while the North Pennines AONB remained missing.

“Both the North Pennines AONB and the South Downs AONB are not on Google Maps and up until very recently neither were some of the National Parks,” he explained. “Now they’ve finally managed to get the Yorkshire Dales National Park on they need to follow it up with the missing AONBS.”

Despite tourism manager, Shane Harris, spending months trying to contact Google, the partnership has hit a dead-end and now it is feared the area’s businesses which rely on tourism will start to be affected by it.

Rachel Milner, marketing and events supervisor at Raby Estates, which includes the famous High Force waterfall, said it was vital the area was visible on the mapping service.

“The Raby Estate relies on tourism to be able to maintain the facilities at High Force waterfall and keep it open and accessible for people to come and see,” she said.

“In this digital age, it’s so important that people can find us and find out how to get to us online and that means being visible on Google Maps.”

Staff at the NP AONB Partnership’s Bowlees Visitor Centre, in Newbiggin, have been left equally baffled by the news.

Marketing and communications officer, Kaye Jemmeson, said: “Bowlees Visitor Centre is a place from which we can signpost people to all the fantastic things that people can see and do in the North Pennines.

“But there’s a scale of this kind of signposting, from national to local, and if a big national mapping programme like Google Maps isn’t highlighting the area then it makes our job that bit harder.”