Cows delay all-female team singing and dancing their way to finish

The women, all from London and in their early 30s, were singing and dancing as they rounded the final corner to be told they had made it home in well under 26 hours and were the first all-women team to get back to Skipton.

"We'll be celebrating with champagne in a minute," said exhausted team captain Hannah Fox. "We didn't quite manage to beat the 24-hour mark but to be the fastest all-female team is absolutely brilliant. It was the most exhilarating, inspiring, painful, hideous, awful, brilliant, painful thing I've ever done."

She revealed the team might have finished even faster. "We got stuck in a herd of cows. We were going along fine and then this huge herd arrived for milking and we couldn't get past. We had to sit for about 20 minutes."

Like many of the other competitors, three of the team members had previously undertaken Oxfam's 100km Trailwalker event on the South Downs and fancied an even greater challenge in the hills of Yorkshire.

"Trailwalker in 2008 was brilliant," Ms Fox said. "Our teammate Jo (Green) said it sounded great and wanted to do this one with us – though there were points last night when I think she was regretting it.

"At the last water stop I felt like lying down and going to sleep."

And what did this team of southerners make of the famous Yorkshire Dales? "It was absolutely stunning, I'd really like to come back and walk parts of it again. It's very beautiful."