BUSINESS on Skipton's High Street was brought to a standstill when staff returned from the Easter break to find seven premises without electricity.

The Craven Herald was one of those hit, and staff worked by emergency lighting.

The problem was reported at 7.18am on Tuesday and affected businesses as far up as The Black Horse Pub and down to the Yorkshire Bank.

The clothes shops and sandwich takeaways in between had to turn business away and lock their doors until power was reconnected.

Eric Howe, manager of the Black Horse, said the power cut had been extremely inconvenient. "We were well down on what we should have taken."

He added that usually the back of the pub would have been packed with diners but he had had to close the area and the kitchens.

Lisa Myers, deputy manager of the clothes store Dorothy Perkins, thinks that the shop would have lost several hundred pounds worth of trade from being closed during the morning.

She said that school holidays were the busiest times for the shop and so the power cut had had a significant effect.

She also pointed out that the shop had been given no explanation for the problem from Yorkshire Electricity.

Ann Walker, from Yorkshire Electricity, said the power failure was due to a fault on a low voltage cable.

She added that the cause of the fault was unknown and could not definitely be linked to the cable laying works which had been taking place along the High Street.

Engineers were on the site at 11.15am and the first businesses were reconnected at 11.55am with the remainder at 1.05pm.

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