The oldest member of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) led the group’s 80th birthday celebrations.

Wenda Reynolds, 97, joined the campaign group’s Oxfordshire branch to mark its anniversary with a party at Jarn Mound Gardens, in Boars Hill, on Saturday.

Ms Reynolds, who lives in West Hanney, has served as a member of the CPRE Vale district committee for more than 35 years.

During the war she worked at Bletchley as a code-breaker and was then an undergraduate at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

At the party she met the group’s youngest member Jennifer Ryan, 21, of West Oxfordshire, who joined six months ago.

A former Oxford Brookes University student, Miss Ryan is now a planning policy assistant with Test Valley Borough Council in Hampshire.

Other guests included Sir Hugo Brunner, the former Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, and Shaun Spiers, CPRE chief executive.

Ms Reynolds said: “I’ve been interested in the countryside ever since moving to West Hanney in about 1970.

“I still enjoy walking and sometimes go up to The Ridgeway. I go to meetings, though I’m not quite so active these days.

“The CPRE continues to do an important job. The Government consults the CPRE but for some reason it is often only the National Trust that gets mentioned.”

The CPRE has been prominent in the national campaign against Government planning reforms.

Last week the Oxfordshire group claimed 41 villages in the county could be put at risk from a development free-for-all if Government proposals to simplify the planning system go ahead.

The group’s stance led to Keith Mitchell, leader of Oxfordshire County Council, resigning from the CPRE and four of Oxfordshire’s five Conservative MPs writing to the Oxford Mail to say they considered the CPRE’s analysis of the planning changes “simply wrong”.

The founding meeting of the group’s Oxfordshire branch took place in 1931 at the County Hall in Oxford. At the time CPRE stood for The Council for the Preservation of Rural England and the national committee had only been founded two years earlier.

The author and MP John Buchan, who lived at Elsfield Manor near Oxford from 1919 to 1935, served as the first chairman.