Grace Millane's mum leaves memory stone on Mount Kilimanjaro

The mother of a British backpacker murdered in New Zealand has left a stone engraved with her daughter's name at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.

Grace Millane, 22, from Wickford in Essex, was killed on a Tinder date in Auckland in December 2018.

Her mother Gillian Millane raised more than £30,000 for charity by climbing the highest mountain in Africa.

Leaving the stone meant that her daughter was "still travelling around the world", she told BBC Breakfast.

She also left a stone engraved with the name of her late husband David, who died from cancer in 2020.

"Grace loved to travel and obviously that was cut very short," she said.

"I always said wherever I go I will put a stone down with her name on it, so in some way she was still travelling around the world and if someone came along and picked it up, she'd go somewhere else.

"So for me to put the pebbles up there with their names on it, that was a really, really big thing."

Mrs Millane trained for months for the challenge, which she said was "one of the toughest physical things" she had ever done and "very, very emotional".

"The training really helped my grief because I had to go to the altitude training centre in London, I had to go to the gym because I knew I wasn't going to get up that mountain otherwise - and there was no way I wasn't going to get up that mountain.

"It's horrible living without your loved ones. I want them both back but I can't have that. It's just another journey that you have to go on," she said.

Mrs Millane was given an award last year for setting up the "Love Grace x" charity, which provides handbags filled with essential and luxury items to domestic abuse refuges.

Some of the money raised from the climb will go towards a charity working to end men's violence against women, called The White Ribbon campaign.

"They [Grace and David] would have been extremely proud, but they would also have made a joke out of saying mum's definitely going through this mid-life crisis. But they would have been proud, definitely.

"Life hasn't been that particularly kind to me in the last four years, that's for sure, for any of my family. But we're all right. We'll get to where we need to be or wherever we think that place is," she added.

Find BBC News: East of England on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you have a story suggestion email [email protected]