Viva Cas Vegas

If The Guardian is to be believed, and who would dare gainsay it, Britain has a new table topper - nose to nose with the London Eye - in the list of most popular paid-for visitor attractions. It draws an annual 3.25 million customers, and it's in Castleford.

Long known to its friends as Cas, Castleford is in West Yorkshire, just off the M62, where three-foot seam meets Heavy Woollen Country and where garrulous Tykes could talk the hind legs off a cuddy. Now, almost overnight, Castleford has become a tourist trap. For Blah Blah Black Sheep read Viva Cas Vegas.

Xscape Castleford, the brainchild of PY Gerbeau - the Frenchman who masterminded the Millennium Dome - is itself on the site of a former colliery. Gerbeau calls it "the perfect holiday destination" - and this time, at any rate, he seems to have found the X-factor.

The first Xscape was opened at Milton Keynes - they know how to pick their sites - five years ago. Castleford followed in 2003, a £70m development near Glasgow in April this year, Dannii Minogue and Orson among those dancing attendance.

Though centred around winter sports - Castleford has Europe's longest "real snow" indoor ski slope and Europe's tallest indoor ice wall - much else, apres-ski, has been added. There are 20 bars and restaurants, a 14-screen cinema, tobogganing and tube riding, games arcades - the latest game's called Attack of the Penguins - and an awful lot of shops.

There's pole dancing - North Pole dancing, perhaps - skate boarding, in summer, perversely, even an indoor beach. The ski slope even does weddings; white weddings, of course. It's where Yorkshire chills out, the view not the same as the London Eye but the adrenaline rush probably quite similar. Ever the Joe Cool, the column sloped along, too.

It's 9. 30am, the ski slope - covered with 1,500 tonnes of the real thing - already busy with the downwardly mobile. It's a curious phrase, "downhill all the way". Does it mean past the peak, or simply finding the going easy? The Cas of thousands - millions, maybe - suggests the latter. "People just come in and think, like, Wow," says Julia North, the marketing assistant to whom the guided tour had been entrusted.

Julia's a snowboarder, gets down OK. "It's cooler than skiing," she says, and Xscape is so cool it's sub-zero, so breathless it's gasping.

So for what else is Castleford famous? "There's rugby and, er, nothing," says Julie. "We're quite proud of being in Castleford." Folks keep arriving with rucksacks bulging like Bonington's biceps, their wallets probably quite bulky too. Appropriately for a former colliery, they still need to dig deep.

"Intensive" one-to-one skiing instruction is £150 an hour, or £220 for a family of four. Half an hour's toboggan tuition, adult and child, is £16. Beginners must pass four "levels" before being considered able to use the main slope. Off-peak, if not off-piste, an hour's skiing begins at around £20.

Scantily shod, Julia declines to walk on the ski slope; the column, in need of a photograph, launches recklessly, slips but by a remarkably improbable feat of balance and agility avoids going A over T. Probably passed level one already

There's an aerial assault course, 20 metres above the ground, the "Vertical Chill" ice wall, two sandstone rock climbing faces modelled on those in Utah.

Safety harnesses everything. "The worst thing that can happen to you is that you feel a bit stiff the next morning," says Aidan Harington, director of the Snow School, but there's an ambulance bay round the back, just in case. By midday, however, the climbing walls appear not to have had a customer. Perhaps just a pretty face.

Though winter is the busiest time -"people like to brush up," says Julia, "besides, everyone speaks English here" - a little avalanche of skiers is already arriving.

The snow can be topped up by an overhead machine, if not from the skies then at least from the gods. Julia says she's unaware of any further Xscape developments. The noonday sun shines on Castleford's snow slopes, nonetheless; the pits no longer.

Lots of famous faces

Cas and tell, ten things - ten and a bit, maybe - that you may never have known about Castleford. Though son of the assistant station master at Thirsk, JL Carr - arguably this column's favourite writer - attended Castleford Secondary Modern School, having twice failed the 11+.

Born in Carlton Minniott in 1912 - it's where Thirsk railway station lies - he flew reccies with Coastal Command, became a headteacher, wrote wonderfully and formed his own publishing house. "Like America," wrote Byron Rogers, his biographer, "he kept on being discovered."

His brother, who recalled the 1920s manager of Thirsk cinema patrolling the aisles with a whip to keep the bairns under control, wasn't discovered at all. At 35 he became station master at Stainton Dale, on the Whitby to Scarborough line, deeming it so idyllic that his train went no further. When given the best kept station award, he was told to take £5 out of the receipts. It was another two months before the receipts totalled a fiver.

Twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, James Lloyd Carr - known to his family as Lloyd - also wrote the eternally endearing J L Carr's Dictionary of Extra-Ordinary Cricketers, which wasn't shortlisted for anything. Carr's Dictionary of Kings' Wives, Celebrated Paramours, Handfast Spouses and Royal Changelings also had a certain ring, though it, too, was never brought to Booker.

His most celebrated novel was A Month in the Country, which became a film starring Kenneth Branagh. How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup was dramatised and ran for six weeks at the Mermaid Theatre, the final played out around an upturned orange box.

"I thoroughly enjoyed it," Carr told the column in 1990, four years before his death. It was his Extra-Ordinary Cricketers, however, who proved so utterly - well - extraordinary.

There was the Trent Bridge groundstaff horse, circa 1890, who, whenever hapless last man Fred Morley walked to the wicket, sidled surreptitiously in turn towards the roller. The horse, Carr added, was called Horace.

There was Dr Heath, headmaster of Eton, who "somewhat unjustly" flogged the entire first team after they'd lost to Westminster; there was Dr Temple, head of Repton, whose view of cricket as "organised loafing" failed shamefully to prevent his elevation to Archbishop of Canterbury and there was Mr Piers, of Bishop Auckland, who in 1875 ordered to be baked a 27oz pot ball in answer to a wager from Mr Brown, who had a six-feet wide bat. Brown had given his opponent six hours to get him out.

"The contest," wrote Carr, "ended after nine and a half minutes." His memorial remains on an old stone barn in Carlton Minniott, where he recalled as a child seeing the biblical engraving: "What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

In 1965, the Newcastle train having conveniently broken down at Thirsk, he spotted its crumbling state and paid for its restoration. We talked of it many years later. "It was a little part of me," he said.

TEN MORE CASE STUDIES:

* Viv Nicholson, infamous Littlewoods winner and Spend Spend Spend author was a Castleford lass. Last heard of, she was a Jehovah's Witness.

* The world's Kit-Kats are made, without a break, in Castleford.

* Actress Michele Dotrice, best remembered in Some Mothers Do Have 'Em, was born in Perseverance Street. Roy Dotrice, her dad, trod the boards for two years at the Albion Street theatre with the Dotrice Players.

* The town is home to Burberry, the clothing manufacturer and retailer.

* Peter Robinson, author of the Inspector Banks novels, was born in Castleford. He now lives in Toronto.

* Larry Grayson made his stage debut in Castleford.

* Former Leeds United and Middlesbrough full back Terry Cooper was born there, as was Manchester United's Alan Smith.

* George Formby, with or without his little ukelele in his hand, met his wife Beryl at a Castleford theatre.

* Henry Moore, the sculptor, was born there.

* The Rugby League team is now known as Castleford Tigers and plays at The Jungle, though they've frightened precious few this season.