A CAT lover is refusing to move from her North Yorkshire caravan home with her 28 feline friends.

Pauline Sandiman, 56, has been ordered to remove her caravan and sheds near South Moor Farm, Snainton, where she has lived without planning permission for 15 years.

Miss Sandiman, who also has a dog, said: "What's going to happen to my cats?

"It's virtually a wildlife sanctuary here. I've got a pet badger called Bill. What will happen to him when they move the caravans?"

Miss Sandiman came to the farm to live with her aunt, the late Ruth Sandiman, and her mother and father when she was a year old.

When the farm was sold off 15 years ago, the spinster and her elderly aunt moved to a static caravan in a field that was owned by the North York Moors National Park Authority, off the Forest Drive in Dalby Forest, near Pickering.

Val Dilcock, the park's head of planning, said that in 1992 the women were refused planning permission for the two caravans and sheds.

When they were issued with an enforcement order, they appealed to the Secretary of State but were unsuccessful.

"Members decided, because it was an elderly lady in her 80s and her carer, they would ask them to sign an agreement to say they could live there until Miss Sandiman moved into residential care or passed away, and then her companion would be given two years to move," said Mrs Dilcock.

Miss Sandiman said she had believed that her late aunt owned the eight-acre patch of land because it was common land that she had farmed and her father had farmed it before her.

She has vowed to stay put until she is forcibly removed.