Mourners were forced to re-arrange a funeral reception after the shock closure of an Otley pub.

And other bookings including a 50th birthday party and a charity event are having to be hastily rearranged after the boards went up at the Summercross Pub, on East Busk Lane, yesterday.

The couple running the pub were left reeling after they say they were given just 48 hours to pack up and leave.

Relief landlord George Oughton, 67, and his wife Anne, 63, had been running the pub for the past ten months, and they say they are shocked and upset by its sudden closure.

Mr Oughton says he asked for the pub to stay open for another week to enable him to honour at least some of the prior bookings including the funeral

But he claims the new owners of the building were not willing to allow him to do that.

The dramatic shut down has come after the Summercross was sold by its previous owners Punch Taverns.

The pub is now owned by Save Investments Limited and is being managed on their behalf by County Estates.

When asked about the pub's future a spokesman for County Estates said they did not answer questions over the phone but would put written questions to their client.

Meanwhile as steel shutters were put up over the windows shocked regulars and residents were left in the dark about the pub's future.

Relief landlord Mr Oughton, who works for an agency, said: "I knew it had been sold but we were told last week just to carry on as normal then on Monday morning I got this terrible phone call.

"We were given just 48 hours notice. That is the shortest ever notice I have ever been given.

"We ran it for ten months and then all of a sudden on Monday morning I got a phone call saying we had to leave on Wednesday morning.

"What has annoyed me is that I have had to cancel the funeral tomorrow, and a 50th birthday on Saturday night.

"It was awful for me to have to phone them up and tell them

"I tried to get a week's grace to do these two functions but they wouldn't let me."

He said the funeral director had contacted the family of the deceased woman and the reception was now being held somewhere else.

But said a British Heart Foundation booking would also have to be cancelled.

Now he has no idea what the pub's future is going to be but he fears the empty building will be vulnerable to vandals and could end up being re-developed.

He alleged that Punch Taverns had sold 205 pubs to a company that was more like a property developer.

Under his normal terms of employment he said he would expect a months notice, and although it was often shorter it has never been as little 48 hours before.

Now Mr Oughton and his wife have returned to their home in Manchester after being told to pack up and leave.

He said: "We were there for ten months, and the reason we stayed was because it was such a nice place and such a beautiful area.

"I have been in this business for 50 years and it has got to be one of the nicest pubs we have ever had.

"Nobody has told me what is going to happen to it. People are very, very upset."

A spokesman for Punch Taverns said the pub had been sold along with a package of 204 others to the Petchey Group in December.

He said Punch had been obliged to sell a number of its premises because of company law which dictated the concentration of pubs owned by a single company in any given area.

He said Punch, which already had 8,500 pubs, had acquired around another 1200 after taking over the business Spirit Group. It was that deal which led to the subsequent sale of a number of other pubs.