FOUR teenagers had an unexpectedly long trip on a theme park's cable car ride yesterday, when it came to a halt 50ft above the ground.

The youngsters were enjoying a day out when they set out on the short trip over Flamingo Land park, near Pickering, North Yorkshire, in the rain, at about 2pm.

But it was an hour later before they had their feet on the ground again - all much wetter and colder but otherwise none the worse for their experience.

The teenagers were in two separate cable cars when the ride's fail-safe system cut in after a fault was detected. Firefighters were called as a precaution and a turntable ladder from Scarborough was used to bring two of the teenagers down.

The park's £150,000 "cherry-picker", bought two years ago as a precautionary measure should any rides need evacuating, lifted the other two to safety.

A park spokesman said: "We have a procedure to deal with this sort of contingency, but because of the weather conditions and time it would have taken, we called the fire service.

"There were no safety issues at all and everything went well. The teenagers were cold and wet but otherwise fine."