PLANS for a £10million leisure complex on a 130-acre site blighted by illegal landfill tipping were unveiled today.

Four East Lancashire businessmen are behind the scheme to build 180 holiday chalets, an education farm and a state-of-the-art equestrian centre including a stud, creating 40 jobs.

They want to develop land around Lower Whitehalgh Farm, off Brokenstones Road, Feniscowles, Blackburn, which has been at the centre of a planning row for a decade.

The new developers today said they had a contract to buy the site should they be given planning permission.

Under the scheme the four businessman - Blackburn-born chartered surveyor John Atherton, who has offices in the Ribble Valley; Hurst Green entrepreneurs Chris Bromley and Neil Molyneux; and town planning consultant Alan Kinder, of Burnley - said they had secured investment cash to develop the site, which has been christened The Greenhill Project.

All four said they had experience in managing such projects, and Mr Atherton is a member of a group called 'Schools For Farms' which promotes the educational benefits of farms. Mr Atherton today said the project would bring to an end years of misery suffered by nearby residents.

He said: "This is a new beginning for Lower Whitehalgh Farm. The local residents have had a raw deal and have had to endure living close to a rubbish dump."

Planning permission was first granted in 1993 for the site to be turned into an 18-hole golf course. In 1998, that planning permission was renewed but a firm, Griffin Bio, began dumping waste on the site, claiming it was to create the right landscape for a golf course. The Environment Agency has since managed to get much of the dumped waste moved.