Once a year, on Christmas Day, the Tan Hill Inn, a remote greystone establishment atop a wind-blasted hump of the Pennine Way, offers its “Family Feast” menu.

This Christmas, it may be forced to stop.

Kentucky Fried Chicken, the American fried-food giant, has contacted the licensees to inform them that they are committing a grave infringement of trademark.

One thing still puzzles Tracy Daly and Mike Pearce, the managers, as they contemplate an impending legal action: how on earth did KFC ever find out about their Christmas special?

The Tan Hill Inn is the highest pub in England, at 1,732ft above sea level. It stands beside an unclassified road that loops across brown unsheltered moorland, four miles outside a tiny North Yorkshire hamlet.

Local farmers like to say that the pub is so high that even the crows have not found it. Even if the crows have not, it seems the lawyers have.

A spokesman for the company said: “ ‘Family Feast’ is a registered trademark of Kentucky Fried Chicken (Great Britain) Limited. KFC devotes significant resources to promoting and protecting its trademarks. This particular instance is being dealt with by our solicitors.”

Contemplating her once-a-year menu, Ms Daly, 40, said: “I don’t know how KFC got to hear about it. It’s a traditional Christmas dinner: paté, turkey, roast beef and the trimmings, Christmas pud.”

KFC is apparently concerned that this could be mistaken for its own Family Feast: a cardboard bucket of fried chicken and chips, coleslaw, potato and gravy, with a 1.25-litre bottle of the customer’s preferred fizzy drink.

“It’s about as similar to a KFC meal as chalk is to cheese,” Ms Daly said.

When a letter arrived from Freshfields, signed by one Giles Pratt, Ms Daly assumed that it must be a late April Fool.

“We are miles away from the nearest high street and the name on the letter made me wonder, so I rang up the solicitors’ offices in Fleet Street to check.

“At first Mr Pratt didn’t know what I was talking about. Only when I gave him a reference number did he find the correspondence. But then he warned me to take the matter very seriously.”

She thought that perhaps KFC might have found the meal listed as an offer on the pub’s website, alongside a list of the inn’s pets: Sherbert the dog, Tan the lamb and two cats named Minty and Toronto.

She told The Times: “I tried typing Family Feast into Google and got about 21,000 entries. I thought: Why are they picking on me? The solicitor told me I shoudn’t take it personally, but I don’t feel anything — it’s just hilarious. They are a multi-million-pound international organisation and I am a little lady up a mountain.”

The little lady is in no mood to give in, however.

“They have turned heavy-duty big-city lawyers loose on us, but I have already had two firms of solicitors offering to take our case for nothing,” she said. “We do have chicken and chips with a salad on the menu, but we use local free-range birds — no coating, no secret spices. I could understand if we had set put to rip off what they do, but this is worlds away.”

In expectation of the impending battle, Alice Dennison, 67, the pub cook, has written a poem. It begins: “I walked one day 500 miles to find a KFC”. Presumably the patent lawyers also covered a lot of ground to find the Tan Hill Inn.

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