A 90-year-old woman hopes to climb the equivalent of a Highland mountain by taking repeated trips up and down her stairs, to raise money for the NHS.
Margaret Payne is aiming to become the latest nonagenarian to undertake physical feats in their own home to help tackle the coronavirus pandemic, after 99-year-old Capt Tom Moore raised more than £17m by walking 100 laps of his garden.
Payne plans to make 282 trips up the stairs at her home in Ardvar in Sutherland, Scotland, an elevation of 731m (2,398ft), the same as the nearby Suilven mountain. She expects her challenge – which she started on Easter Sunday – to take about two months to complete.
On Thursday she passed her initial target to raise £10,000 for the NHS and the Highland hospice that looked after her husband, Jim, before his death at Christmas. By Friday afternoon she had raised nearly £100,000.
“I wasn’t expecting anything like it – 10,000 thank yous,” she said. “It’s brilliant of them all and I feel the NHS really deserve it. They have been amazing. Each day they are risking their lives.”
Writing on her JustGiving page before starting her challenge, she said: “At 90 I am planning to climb the equivalent of Suilven … 2,398 feet ... in stairs at Ardvar. That’s 17 stairs, a flight being 8 1/2 feet each time. 282 times total is my challenge. I think it is going to take me about two months!”
She said she had first climbed Suilven at the age of 15 with her sister during the second world war. “I have now lived in the Highlands for over 40 years and I would like to raise funds to support the NHS in particular at this difficult time,” she said.
Payne’s inspiration, Moore, was congratulated by figures ranging from the prime minister to David Beckham when he successfully walked 100 laps of his garden in Bedfordshire. By Friday morning he had received donations from more than 800,000 people.
“At no time when we started off with this exercise did we anticipate we’d get anything near that sort of money,” he told the BBC. “It just shows that people have such high regard for matters of our National Health Service and it’s really amazing that people have paid so much money.”
Moore had initially hoped to raise £1,000 for NHS Charities Together, via JustGiving. The company said his feat had broken the platform’s record for the largest total ever raised through a single campaign.
The fundraising site has since been under pressure to reveal whether it profited from Moore’s efforts. The platform asks donors to make a voluntary contribution, set at a default 10% of the donation amount, which people can opt out of.
The US software company Blackbaud – which bought JustGiving in 2017 – said it would add £100,000 to Moore’s fundraiser, the largest donation the platform has ever made to a cause.
