Get lost in Yorkshire’s strangest garden.
Plenty of people have written about the Forbidden Corner. It’s one of those Yorkshire Dales attractions everyone seems to have a story about, usually involving a dead end, a face they weren’t expecting to see behind a door or a photo of someone looking mildly traumatised. We’re not going to pretend we’ve found some undiscovered secret here. We just went, got thoroughly lost, and came out the other side grinning. Here’s what we found this year.
One Man’s Fantasy, Turned Into Everyone’s Day Out
We’re big fans of a folly. There’s something quietly brilliant about one person’s fantasy, ego, and sheer bloody-mindedness getting turned loose on a patch of land, with no committee to talk them out of it. That’s exactly how the Forbidden Corner started.
A quick slice of history for you: Back in 1979, Colin Armstrong planted a grove of fir trees as a windbreak for his stables at Tupgill Park, near Leyburn in Wensleydale. A decade later, he and architect Malcolm Tempest set out to build a grotto, but the excavated site kept filling with water. Most people would have called that a drainage problem and moved on. Colin, however, kept digging. Gardens grew up around the hole, a tower went up featuring a giant carved face and a labyrinth evolved within. What started as a private folly for one man’s own amusement opened to the public in 1994 and has been loved by families ever since, now pulling in around 80,000 visitors a year.
Crowned “the strangest place in the world,” there was a real fight to keep it open when the National Park nearly shut it down over planning permission. Loyal visitors saved it with a petition and thousands of letters. People Power decided this madness was worth keeping.
We’re glad they did.
What’s Actually Behind Every Door
Today the Forbidden Corner is a proper labyrinth: tunnels, chambers, mazes, sculptures, gardens, follies, towers, and a fairly relentless stream of surprises. There’s no map handed out, though there is an app if you want one. We didn’t bother. We preferred to take it as it came, backtracking when we hit dead ends, doubling back on ourselves without any real plan.
It’s oddly like our approach to travel generally, so it suited us fine.
The genius of the place is that there’s no rhyme or reason to the route. It has proper Alice Through the Looking Glass energy; if you’re trying to reach somewhere, heading in the opposite direction is often your best bet. Every corner is a small gamble. Open a door, and you might find a Romanesque statue, a devil, a gruesome ogre, a water trap waiting to catch you out, or nothing at all but another dead end.
My highlight was the Cat and Rat Experience: you squeeze through a genuinely tight space, thinking that’s the whole ordeal, and then a massive animatronic cat appears out of nowhere. I laughed my way through it, though while I stood there watching, a child hurrying past gave a proper yelp when the cat made its move.
There’s also a real family crypt on site, complete with actual graves, given the full sound-and-light treatment for maximum spookiness. Whimsical, magical, occasionally creepy, sometimes properly disorientating, and distinctly odd – that’s the Forbidden Corner in five adjectives, and we mean all five as compliments.
Families, Fair Warning
This is a genuinely brilliant day out for kids of all ages, but a few things are worth knowing before you turn up with a buggy, we didn’t have little ones in tow ourselves, but it was hard to miss the pinch points as we went round.
The tunnels are narrow. Some of them require an actual squeeze, which is part of the fun for anyone over about knee-height but looked like a real headache for anyone with a pushchair. Several stretches simply won’t take one through, so be prepared to carry littler ones for parts of the visit if you’re bringing a buggy.
On the fright front, the crypt and its sound-and-light effects, plus the sudden reveals (that cat, for one), can catch very young or easily spooked children off guard. Nothing horror-film grim, but enough jump-scare energy that it’s worth a heads-up if you’ve got a sensitive four-year-old.
Rosemary’s favourite part was the Roman-style facade that leads directly down into the dark, labyrinthine Temple of the Underworld. She was particularly smug about dodging the subtle water features and unlike me did not get wet!
The upside of all this chaos: opening a door with genuinely no idea what’s on the other side is rare in a world where every attraction comes with a map and a queue system. Here, not knowing is the entire point.
Food and Practicalities
There’s a decent spread of food on site, we stuck to coffee and a very good slice of cake at the Corner Café, both reasonably priced, though the White Goose Pizza Company and the Saddle Room are there too if you want something while you’re lost! Plus The Potting Shed for ice creams, drinks and maybe a bacon sarnie.
Parking and Tickets
Parking is free, which is one less thing to think about after you’ve already paid to get in. Entry itself is by pre-booked, timed ticket only: Adults £19, children aged 4 to 15 £17, under-4s free, or £66 for a family of two adults and two children (2026 prices). The timed slots are enforced strictly, which can feel like a faff if you arrive early, but it’s a small price for not having the gardens rammed. Stroll the wider estate while you wait, or grab a slice of cake in the café, and it’s barely an inconvenience.
Is It Worth It?
If quirky, whimsical, slightly bizarre days out are your thing, yes, unreservedly. The appeal of the Forbidden Corner lies entirely in its surreal, chaotic sense of mystery. It’s not trying to make sense, and that’s why it works. Go in with no plan, embrace the dead ends, and let one man’s fifty-year-old obsession do the rest.
At the very end I got my own back on Rosemary for her smugness by locking her in the stocks!
• Ready to get lost in Yorkshire’s strangest garden? All the details on tickets and opening times live on the Forbidden Corner’s own website, right here.
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Where to next
• Little Woodham, living history in Hampshire
• Isle of Wight: The little island that refuses to be boring
• Vindolanda: Britain’s Most Extraordinary Roman Site