Every spring for decades my neighbour, Jan Moore, who has died aged 96, would fly 10,000 miles from her home in Brisbane, Australia, to the Ayrshire harbour village of Maidens. There she would spend the summer in a cottage overlooking the Clyde and the Isle of Arran.

Her annual pilgrimage was down to her Scots blood; she was born and raised in Maidens, and vowed in the mid-1960s that she would return each year. Her cottage in the village was near mine, and that is how we came to know each other.

Jan was born in Maidens to James Sloan, a fisherman, and Elizabeth (nee Howatson), a cheesemaker. The family home was only steps away from the property that she later returned to year after year.

After attending Carrick academy in nearby Maybole, she trained as a teacher at the Moray House School of Education in Edinburgh and then worked in various Ayrshire schools, including Maidens primary, where she herself had been a pupil.

At the age of 21 she travelled with her mother to Australia on a family trip, and in Adelaide they had been driven around by the only person they knew with a car – a young man named Alan Moore, an agronomy student. Three years later he suddenly showed up in Maidens. Romance blossomed, and an engagement was announced. When Alan left for the US for his doctoral studies, Jan followed, and they married in 1954, after which she concentrated on raising their family.

In subsequent years Alan’s work as an agronomist took them to Canada, Nigeria, the Netherlands, India and Italy, countries in which Jan was able to indulge her curiosity about the world. She and Alan were especially fond of Italy, where they could indulge their mutual passion for zipping around in Alpha Romeo sports cars.

In 1965 a new job for Alan took them to Australia, where they settled for good. It was about five years later that Jan began her annual pilgrimages back home. After Alan’s death in 2004, and well into her tenth decade, she continued to return every year. She was packing her bags ready for another trip earlier this year when ill health prevented her from going.

She is survived by her four children, David, Nicholas, Fiona and Catriona, and five grandchildren. Her ashes were placed in the nearest cemetery to Maidens, in the village of Kirkoswald.