A conservationist who managed to change the route of the M40, has died.

Joan Elisabeth 'Betty' Coxon died, aged 94, in hospital in London on Thursday.

The daughter of Melville Patterson, the vice-president of Trinity College, and the Hon Clara Money-Coutts, a descendent of the banking family and a great-niece of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, the Victorian philanthropist, she was born in north Oxford and was brought up in Boars Hill.

Her family's neighbours included the poets John Masefield, Robert Bridges and Robert Graves. The family also knew George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells.

She attended Wychwood School in North Oxford, and later married Sebastian Salaman.

Following their divorce, she lived with her two sons at Milton-under-Wychwood before returning to Boars Hill, where she developed an interest in beekeeping, and founded the Oxfordshire-based Anglo-Polish Apiary.

She married Rufus Coxon, an ex-Irish Guardsman, and veteran of the Somme, and moved with him and her sons to Kings Sutton on the Oxfordshire/Northamptonshire border, where she became an active conservationist.

She successfully campaigned to save the village railway station from closure, and fought plans to build the M40 close to the village, along the east side of the Cherwell.

Her son, Nick Salaman, said: "The family lived in the village for 35 years, and it was here that Betty's interest in the countryside and its flora and fauna really flowered, often finding expression in paintings.

"Many a cause and many a threatened corner owe their continued existence wholly or partly to her activities. The primroses in Newbottle wood and the nesting swans on the canal at Aynho are a few of her myriad causes.

"Her first great achievement was to keep the railway station at Kings Sutton open when all the villages were losing their stations.

"Almost single-handedly, she then succeeded in pushing the M40 motorway from the east side of the Cherwell, which was the engineers' preferred route and which would have caused severe disruption and nuisance to the village, up beyond the brow of the hill where it lay concealed behind a cutting.

"It was heroic and took a good deal out of her and her husband, who died soon afterwards."

After the death of her husband she moved to Charlton, and later to a nursing home in London.

Mr Salaman said: "Betty had a lively sense of humour and a firm moral sense. She was always interested in life, she loved people, and she was full of knowledge."