A BOLTON man has raffled off his luxury £800,000 property.

A woman from Warrington is now the proud owner of the house after paying just £2 for a raffle ticket.

Former Boltonian, Dunstan Low, bought the historic six-bed home Melling Manor, Lancashire six years ago.

But he struggled to meet mortgage repayments when his business suffered a downturn.

To avoid reposession, he decided to raffle the house charging £2 per ticket and hoping to sell 500,000 tickets to cover the original £845,000 asking price for the property when it was listed in December 2016.

Yesterday, Tuesday August 17, it was announced on the Win a Country Home website that Marie Segar, from Warrington, was chosen at random as the winner of the Grade II Listed, six bedroomed home.

Speaking to the Blackpool Gazette, Dunstan said Marie was in shock and had not even told anyone she had entered the competition.

She will now also take on the title of Lady Melling of Melling Manor for a year after buying 20 tickets for the draw.

Dunstan added: "Over the past six months we have sold 500,000 paid entries to our raffle and we have had around 12,000 free entries.

"We have people from Bentham, Lancaster, all the way to the Bronx, New Zealand enter the competition."

A £30,000 donation from the money raised will go to St John’s Hospice in Lancaster as well as a £10,000 donation to the children's charity NYAS (National Youth Advocacy Service) based in Birkenhead.