WHEN Ann Bowes gets the bit between her teeth, there is no stopping her. She has written, produced and marketed her first book and dedicated it to the memory of her 25-year-old son, who drowned nine years ago.

Riding For Life is her account of her sponsored ride from Morecambe Bay in the west to Runswick in the east in 2000, to raise money for Leukaemia Research. A close friend had been diagnosed with the disease, joined in part of the ride while receiving treatment but sadly died the following December.

The record of the ride started as a scrapbook of photographs intended for her grandchildren and grew into a polished product. In some ways it has been her salvation, the sheer effort involved helping to fill a void caused by her son's death.

Mrs Bowes has lived in the tiny hamlet of Fryup, near Danby in North Yorkshire, for about 34 years.

She was brought up on her father's farm nine miles away and went to school in Uckford. She went on to a convent school in Scarborough to end her education and she is married to a gamekeeper, Alan, who retires this year, so they will soon be moving house.

From being a child, she had always wanted to have her own horse.

"My husband promised me he would buy me one as soon as we lived somewhere with a field and when we came here, he did," she said.

Her first horse was a cob from Middlesbrough, which had been pulling a bread van, and she taught herself to ride with the help of books.

But with three children aged four, three and six months in tow, there wasn't too much time for horses. The family expanded to four - a daughter and three sons - and as the years rolled by she bought, broke and trained her own horses.

With the family grown into adults, she made herself feel needed again by helping with riding lessons for disabled children at a nearby centre.

It was a fairly uneventful life until a dark Sunday in May 1994. Rain had been falling steadily all day when her son, Dan, set off to return from a night out in Glaisdale.

Unknown to his parents, he had given two friends a lift to Danby, so he was taking different route to his own home. It took him over Duck Bridge, an old pack bridge where a newly-built high-level ford had been installed. The waters had risen high, making it difficult to tell the difference in the dark between the river and the road and his car was swept away.

"The worst of it all was that we didn't know," said his mother. "It wasn't unusual for him to decide to stay with a friend overnight and go straight to his job the next morning .We didn't think anything of it.

"But he always came home for his dinner on Monday teatime and that was when I started to get worried."

Telephone calls established where he had last been seen and a search was launched. He was found by his father and the head keeper. The family's grief was terrible and it has had a lasting effect on them all.

"He was such a well-known, popular lad. He stayed at home and built dry-stone walls. He just lived for cricket and football and was captain of the local cricket club. He loved hunting and was about to be taken on to look after the hounds for the Glaisdale Hunt. Everyone in the valley knew him," said Mrs Bowes.

The one ray of sunshine in all the darkness was that three weeks later her mare, Ruby, gave birth to a healthy colt foal - a first attempt at breeding. There was only one name came to mind, Danny Boy, who six years later carried her on her marathon ride.

"The ride itself was good, but it had its moments because it covered the anniversary of Dan's death." she went on. "Grief is always there and it is very easy to give into it.

"It was a wonderful feeling to complete it, but it was very hard. You were riding seven long days and I was 54 at the time."

She admits to receiving a lot of help from friends and family in the writing, editing and publishing of the book.

"I started writing chapters in longhand and a friend used to decode and print them out. But eventually she didn't have the time and gave me her laptop instead. I went to classes to learn to do it properly and also learned to do desk top publishing," she said.

The simply and sincerely written story includes the fogs, bogs and driving rain of the Pennines; the shock of multi-lane motorways, express trains and RAF fighter jets on horses and riders; fundraising along the way where one confused woman gave them a bag of old pans; and being escorted into Helmsley by equine superstar, Desert Orchid.

It has been beautifully illustrated by a professional, Linda Tindall-Raw, who lives nearby.

"Someone has put money into this for me and another local person gave me a very generous donation. It has been very much a local production and a share of the profits will go to medical research," added Mrs Bowes.