TRIBUTES have been paid to a "quietly adventurous woman" was has died at the age of 95, two years after penning her first novel.

Angela Dunford Wood died at her home in Lyme Regis. She published her first novel, How Many Roads, at the age of 93, and had just finished the last draft of her second novel.

Angela Elliott was born in Oxfordshire in 1921, the daughter of a doctor, who she accompanied on his daily rounds in order to hold the reins of his horse while he visited the sick.

Paying tribute to his mother, artist Hugh Dunford Wood, said: "My mother Angela was a quietly adventurous woman, devoted to Dorset from a young age when her father built an arts and crafts cottage at Ringstead Bay in the late 1920s.

"She first sailed into Lyme Regis at the age of 16, bringing a dingy from Salcombe to Ringstead. Little did she know how important the town would be to her in her last years. She came here after being told she had six months to live from kidney disease, and stayed with my wife Candida and I for more than ten years."

Angela won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) just before the outbreak of the Second World War, but had barely completed her first term before she was persuaded to train as a physiotherapist.

"She was always creative, playing the piano and often performing in amateur dramatics," added Hugh,

"She won prize rosettes in the motorised fossils races in the Lyme Lympics and was an inventive Scrabble opponent. I was amazed and proud to witness her 15 minutes of fame in becoming the world’s oldest debutante novelist, even though we had to rush publication in face of one of her many imminent demises.

"Having studied at RADA in the late 1930s she was surprisingly adept at rising from her deathbed, and must have lived a good nine lives here in Lyme Regis."

Angela's ashes will be laid to rest at the cliffside chapel of St Catherine’s above Ringstead during Easter week.