A MOTHER-OF-THREE died suddenly as she spent the weekend away with her partner and their children, an inquest was told.

Jayne Anne Rickard, 37, of Wingate, County Durham, was found unconscious during a visit to a caravan park near Appleby, in Cumbria, last year.

An inquest at Kendall County Court, in Cumbria, heard that Ms Rickard had travelled to the Wild Rose Park, at Ormside, near to Appleby, on Friday, June 13.

David McCallum, her partner of 18 years, told the inquest that they would spend every weekend at the holiday home with their children aged three, four and eight.

He said that on the evening of June 13 the family had arrived, a week after the Appleby Horse Fair, and they had eaten a meal.

Ms Rickard had put two of the children to bed before going to sleep herself.

Mr McCallum said he heard Ms Rickard go outside for a cigarette and then go back to sleep on the morning of Saturday, June 14.

Then two hours later he woke up to find that she was not breathing.

Mr McCallum, of Coronation Road, Wingate, said: “I knew something was wrong. I tried to wake her up but I couldn’t.”

A Cumbria Police spokesman said: “We were called by the ambulance service but we could see no criminal element to it.

“We checked and found no suspicious circumstances, so we made the coroner aware.”

Pathologist Dr Fergus Young told the inquest that the cause of death was pulmonary oedema, or an excess of fluid in the lungs, plus a haemorrhage.

Assistant coroner Alan Sharp speaking at the inquest on Wednesday (January 14) recorded an open verdict.

He said: “Although the pathologist found the end result to be a very heavily congested lung, he couldn't isolate the initial cause.

“There are two possibilities. One is that she had a problem with her lung, and the other is that she has brought up some of the contents of her stomach which had gone into her lungs.”