WHAT angle are we to take on the Forbidden Corner, the by-now celebrated folly - height of folly, some might say - in North Yorkshire? On which of its many levels should it be considered? Is it fun for all the family or, as someone said of golf, a good walk spoiled? Is it mystic maze or multiple dead end, engaging eccentricity or environmental intrusion?

"No access to Forbidden Corner" said a junction sign off the A684, by which it probably meant "No access to you lot, anyway". We persevered, paid our money, £4.50 apiece, and took the chance.

The Forbidden Corner is near Middleham, built for his own jollification by a chap called Colin Armstrong, who was honorary British consul in Ecuador and whose family has lived on the Tupgill estate since Victorian times.

Three years ago he opened it to the public. The Yorkshire Dales National Park, a body which not so much courts controversy as goes down on one knee and proposes holy wedlock to it, ordered him to apply for retrospective planning permission and, when he did, refused it.

His diplomatic skills having been exhausted - probably they don't have National Park committees in Ecuador - Mr Armstrong appealed to the Department of the Environment. Earlier this month it was announced he'd won, and the Forbidden fruit must have tasted quite wonderful.

Fancifully termed a sculpture park, it was designed by Malcolm Tempest, an architect from Newton-le-Willows, near Bedale. A whimsy, they reckon, bits added on as the muse alighted, a few blind alleys for good measure.

Now entry is limited to 120 an hour, necessarily booked in advance, and not before noon so as not to disturb the racehorses. Like Covent Garden, or something, we got a cancellation prize and looked in for the one o'clock show.

It's perhaps best known for its underground areas. Some, warns a notice outside, are dimly lit. "Persons with extreme claustrophobia, angina or susceptible to panic attacks may find some parts distressing," it adds.

The most distressing part, in truth, was having to part with £4.50.

There's a colourful brochure, which lists in verse some of the attractions but not - part of the fun - the order in which they appear.

In woodland glade

Or the dark world below,

Watch your step

And mind how you go

Near the entrance there is a sort of audio-visual monster in a dungeon. "Look, aren't its tonsils red," someone said.

The gardens are lovely, the idea ingenious. Everywhere there are busts and statues of cherubs and gladiators and things - like a clearance sale of Up Pompeii's props department - and atop a mock-temple entrance the inscription "cave aquae".

It's one of many little jokes, mostly to do with getting wet. For Forbidden Corner, read Water Works.

Those who remember their Billy Bunter will know that "Cave" is simply the Latin for "Beware" - Cave, Quelch - and would probably have had a little accent over the e had the Romans not been so busy inventing other things less important.

The temple simply hides a boy having a pee, like that long running little lad in Copenhagen, and there were queues to watch him at it.

A thin woman who perhaps had failed her O level Latin got her new shoes wet and skelped the bairn's backside in retaliation. It wasn't perhaps, what the poor child had meant by fun.

Most other youngsters appeared to love it, though there is something of the King's New Clothes about it all. "What are we supposed to be looking at?" inquired a boy of ten or so, faced with a solid glass pyramid, salvaged from a fire-hit factory.

There are carved bears playing cards, more Yogi than Yeti, an Ariel confined by a witch to a tree - perhaps one of Mr Tempest's more literal jokes - a giant green axeman, carved from oak, whose hosepipe appeared to have been disconnected. Possibly it was the little boy with the sore bottom, perhaps his punitive parent.

There are gargoyles, griffins, grotesques and gimme-a-clues....

Three paths lead off

And out of sight

In time you'll know

Which one is right?

It's said to cover four acres. In four acres of Coverdale, 120's a crowd. A chap in Northallerton prison once confided that the thing he missed most was being able to walk 100 yards in a straight line, and we were reminded of it at the Forbidden Corner.

In the Yorkshire dales, for the over 16s at any rate, the best things in life are free.

l The Forbidden Corner is open until October 31, and on Sundays until Christmas. Until September 10, admission is by pre-booked ticket only. Call 01969 640638 for details.

JUST when you think you've heard every reason for a train delay, the most awful of all uncoiled itself on Tuesday evening. The north bound 4pm from Darlington was already over an hour late, other trains stacking up behind, when it was delayed a further 25 minutes at Durham by an elderly Scottish lady who'd become helplessly hysterical and needed medical attention.

The reason, it transpired, was that some Glasgow guano on the next table was showing off a boa constrictor to his no less inebriated mates.

The reptile was eventually put off at Durham. The snake was put off, too.

STILL with a sniff of the barmaid's apron, Tony Hillman in Darlington reports seeing a newspaper contents bill with the message "Drink river signs pledge". Is this, he asks, what's meant by meandering?

LAST week's column on the 25th anniversary of Bayfair magazine in Robin Hood's Bay reminded Esther Holiday in Darlington of the turn of the 20th Century Bay Fair held there every Whit Bank Holiday. Her parents met there, married in 1905.

"There were roundabouts, swings, coconut shies, fortune tellers and races," writes Mrs Holiday, who must be a canny old age herself.

Such is the world's smallness, that friends returned from Namibia last week bearing a copy of Buchter News - Bay News, translated - serving the coastal town of Luderitz. Its other virtues notwithstanding, we experiment from page 12 with the first scientific joke in history:

Two atoms walking down the street. "Hey, I've just lost an electron" says one.

"Are you sure?" asks his mate.

"Yes" he replies, "I'm positive."

l Details of Bayfair magazine, and of the "Willie Seagull" commemorative mugs, from Jim Foster, Coralline, Silver Street, Robin Hood's Bay, North Yorkshire YO22 4SB.

THE appropriately named Mrs Holiday also recalls The Northern Echo's Easter Monday walking race - 1920s, 1930s - from Sunderland to Darlington.

"Darlington at the time was the only town open, except for Thirsk. People came from all over the North-East. There was a trophy and, I think, cash for the winner," she says.

Their feet up now, perhaps, but does anyone else have memories of the Easter exhaustions?

AND finally...some better news of the North-South divide. A survey in the Publican Newspaper reveals that the average price of a pint in the North-East is £1.62 - lager £1.87 - compared with £1.91 and £2.13 in the south-east. Only in the north-west, £1.56 and £1.84, is it cheaper. Cheers.