NATIONAL park watchdogs have clashed head on with a major tourist attraction which brings thousands of visitors into the Yorkshire Dales telling the owners to demolish a new castle folly built without planning permission.

Members of the National Park's planning committee said the nearly ten metre high folly at The Forbidden Corner, near Middleham, was an unacceptable development, they've given the owners three months to demolish it.

“The Forbidden Corner is a very welcome success story, which makes a significant positive contribution to the local economy,” said Robert Heseltine, the Park's Member Champion for Development Management.“But it cannot be right to build a large castle folly, visible for miles around, in an historic and culturally important landscape, without even bothering to seek planning permission.”

The Park authority was told about the new folly, which lies within the Forbidden Corner gardens at Tupgill Park, in March this year. Building work stopped with the gatehouse part of the folly at a height of about seven metres above the surface of a wall-fronted walkway, a total of nine and a half metres above the deer park.

A retrospective application for planning permission was submitted by the Forbidden Corner but was withdrawn after National Park officers recommended the Planning Committee refuse permission. Officers said the folly would introduce: "an inauthentic, pastiche building of significant scale and prominence into a nationally important, protected landscape."

The owner of The Forbidden Corner Colin Armstrong who has built it up over the last twenty years said they have been unfairly treated and would be appealing against the parks decision.

"We provide employment and bring a large number of visitors into the Dales. This is a sympathetic addition to the landscape I don't think I am vandalising the Dale, I am adding to it, the Dales are precious to all of us. This restores the views that people had originally across to Sutton Bank which have now disappeared because the trees have grown up.

"Only one neighbour objected there have been no other complaints."