Visitors to the North Yorkshire Moors National Park can see the shape of things to come now that the first of the radomes has been installed at the ballistic missile early warning station at Fylingdales.

One of the radomes under construction. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis via Getty Images

Members of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England who have studied this teed-up golf ball from various angles have found little to mollify them. Mr T. J. Mitchell, of the Scarborough and Pickering branch says the radomes are hideous things to have in a national park but takes some small consolation from finding that they are conspicuous over a smaller area than he first feared.

Though prominent from the Goathland side and the Guisborough to Whitby road, they are not to be seen, he says, from Scarborough and Whitby. What he did not expect, and what has horrified him, is the ugliness of a new radio station set up near the radomes.

Mr G. McGuire, a member of the Ryedale branch, says that the two reflectors of this additional station are “the ugliest things on the moor – like two hideous eyes peering at one across the moors.”

RAF Fylingdales, the grey pyramid, 2002. Photograph: John Giles/PA

The Fylingdale radomes were in use until 1992, when they were replaced by an advanced radar system, the three sided solid-state phased-array radar (SSPAR) grey pyramid. The golf balls were subsequently dismantled.