VETERAN daredevil Trish Wagstaff has thanked people for their generosity after they backed her fundraising wing walk.

The 84-year-old who lives near Abingdon completed the daring feat last month and celebrated getting her feet back on the ground with a bacon butty.

The wing walk was the latest in a series of daring exploits for the pensioner who has also plunged from the sky dangling from a parachute, swam with sharks and walked along a zip-wire.

After completing the wing walk at Chiltern Air Park at Ipsden near Wallingford, Mrs Wagstaff said she hoped to raise more than £20,000.

Now all the donations have been counted and Mrs Wagstaff, from Appleton, near Abingdon, has confirmed that she has raised £22,700.50 for Cancer Research UK after touring 21 villages in southern Oxfordshire.

She said: "I'm absolutely delighted that I beat my target - this has totally exceeded my expectations but people have been so marvellous.

"The wing walk wasn't the slightest bit frightening although I think my family were having hysterics on the ground below.

"I started going round the villages in March and I did all the collecting on my own - there was a lot of pavement pounding involved.

"The reaction I got on the doorstep was fantastic - people were so generous but they know there is a lot of cancer out there so they are happy to give generously.

"Sometimes children came to the door and gave me the money they had been saving up.

"I did this all on my own - the only help I got was from a chartered accountant who added up all the donations on the sponsorship forms."

Mrs Wagstaff is a former army wife of the late Peter Wagstaff, who died nine years ago from cancer.

The mum-of-two and grandmother-of-two has beaten the £15,251 she raised skydiving for Great Ormond Street Hospital, or the £11,500 she raised tackling the longest zipwire in Europe.

After working with Sobell House hospice for 25 years Mrs Wagstaff's fundraising total for the charity alone is more than £120,000.

In 2012 Mrs Wagstaff, who has lived in Appleton for 41 years, said she was "completely shocked" when she was honoured with a British Empire Medal for her services to charity.

Cancer Research UK spokeswoman Jenny Makin earlier praised Mrs Wagstaff for completing the wing walk and said it was not for the faint-hearted.

Money raised from Mrs Wagstaff's latest adventure will be channelled specifically to Oxford’s Cyclotron Appeal.

The £5.5m appeal is for the state-of-the art piece of equipment for the Churchill Hospital, which helps to determine and diagnose a patient’s cancer.

Mrs Wagstaff added: "I have got an idea for another fundraiser but I'm not telling anyone what it is yet."