ANN Sparkes has promised her friends that she won't be doing any more sponsored expeditions.

At almost 79, she can be forgiven for hanging up her rucksack.

But she was born with an adventurous streak that has led her to travel far and wide.

She has just been sorting through the slides she took on her latest expedition, which took her to the summit of four volcanoes in Nicaragua.

"Here's the most amazing sunset ... and look, there's the tent I slept in.

"And here are some of the children we met, here's one of our guides, and this is our group of walkers," she says enthusiastically, as she works her way through the slides, which show thermal pools, lush vegetation and subsistence farmers working their land.

Her talent as a photographer means she has plenty of reminders of the places they visited and the people she met.

There were 16 walkers who roughed it for the ten days and nights of the trek and she agrees that she was by far the oldest group member.

They were all committed to raising money for the Leonard Cheshire charity.

Ann succeeded in raising more than £4,000, to be shared between the charity's South West Wiltshire Care at Home Service, which helps to improve the quality of life for disabled people, and a Leonard Cheshire Home in Nicaragua.

Ann was born in India and brought up there until she was seven, when the family came to England and settled in East Knoyle.

After the war, she married in Ceylon, staying there until the late '60s.

She said: "My father was a judge and my husband was a tea-planter, so that meant I had two British Raj lives."

During the Second World War, she had worked for MI5 before joining the Women's Royal Naval Service and training as a signaller.

"I was at Ryde and I had to hoist the flags to announce the end of the war to all the shipping in the Solent," she said.

She later worked as a secretary for the military government in northern Germany, and recalls how she managed to find stabling for her horse in return for cigarettes.

A grandmother of eight, Ann and her late husband Michael had two daughters and a son, who were born in Ceylon.

They all settled in south Wiltshire in 1969 and Ann began working for Leonard Cheshire as his secretary for two-and-a-half days a week in 1972.

Her link with the charity continues to this day, although Cheshire himself died nine years ago.

"In all those years I have worked for the charity, either paid or voluntarily," she said.

She has visited projects in India and Nicaragua, and did a sponsored expedition in Tashkent, in the western Himalayas.

That trip was also in aid of Leonard Cheshire but done in memory of her husband.

She might have given up expeditions but Ann is still full of energy.

She hopes to continue walking regularly with the Cathedral Strollers, plans to learn Spanish and will carry on exhibiting her paintings as a member of the Pepperbox Artists.