By Luke Salkeld for dailymail.co.uk

In the past five years she has run 20,000 miles across some of the world's most hostile terrain.

In that time she has suffered frostbite and double pneumonia. She has been hit by a bus, was almost swept to her death in a raging river and had to cope with fearsome bears and hungry wolves.

She has also been accosted by a drunken axeman in the woods. And received 29 marriage proposals. 

But yesterday Rosie Swale-Pope was back in Britain.

The 61-year-old grandmother stepped off a boat at Scrabster in northern Scotland to begin the final leg of her journey home to Tenby in south-west Wales.

Greeted by family and friends, she said: 'It is wonderful to be back after all this time. I'm filled with huge excitement and joy because, at last, home is now on the horizon.'

The intrepid pensioner on her travels in Times Square, New York

She set off in October 2003, her purpose to raise money for cancer charities  -  she lost her husband Clive to prostate cancer in 2002  -  and an orphanage in Russia.

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