A sheep farmer who faked letters and will documents from a dead landowner to try to inherit his £1.1m estate faces jail after being found guilty of fraud.

Janice Margaret Johnson, 66, forged several papers from different individuals that suggested she was entitled to the late John Harper's farm, near Millom.

Preston Crown Court heard she lived seven miles from Mr Harper and hatched a plan to obtain his property, Scrithwaite Farm, after his death in February 2016.

Prosecutors said she'd used his fields to graze her sheep for 19 years and may have "convinced herself" that she was "very much entitled" to the estate.

They said she'd "deliberately selected" dead men, including her dad, as 'witnesses' to her faked documents so they couldn't be questioned by police or solicitors.

But she was caught out after leaving a trail of errors in her "desperate attempt" to win the farm solely for herself and keep her business going, the court heard.

Johnson was found guilty of five counts of fraud by false representation at Preston Crown Court after a week-long trial.

Prosecutor Sarah Magill said about the defendant: "Things were not going well, and she must have begun to become very frustrated.

"It is entirely possible that Mrs Johnson felt very much entitled to the farm as she had farmed it for some 19 years.

"It is not hard to imagine that she convinced herself that John Harper would have wanted her to have the farm."

Ms Magill said Johnson's offending took place between March 9, 2016 and January 25, 2019.

She told the jury that the defendant had written a series of letters during this period, claiming to be Mr Harper and others after his death.

And these had made plain his supposed wish to leave her his house, farm buildings and land, the court heard.

Ms Magill said: "The crown say the defendant was responsible and that if she didn't write those initial letters, she certainly knew that they were complete fabrications and she took them to her solicitors in a desperate attempt to win the farm."

The prosecution said Johnson later went even further in her attempts to acquire the property - by falsely suggesting her dead dad had witnessed the forged letters.

Ms Magill told the court that Johnson added an annotation between existing lines of her deceased father's old diary.

This stated he and a friend, who was also dead at the time of her writing, witnessed a will completed by Mr Harper that gave her the deeds to Scrithwaite Farm.

But Ms Magill said that the late addition stood out because there was no evidence in the remainder of the diary that he had done this elsewhere.

The prosecutor added: "She deliberately selected two dead men to be the witnesses so that they could not be spoken to by the police or by the solicitors."

The court heard that Johnson also penned a letter to herself, pretending to be her late father writing to her in 1999, which she handed to her solicitors.

However, when police searched her house three years later, she said they had found a draft version of that same document.

Ms Magill also pointed to other mistakes that Johnson had made in her attempts to forge papers that showed her entitlement to the estate.

The first was to pre-date a letter one year before Mr Harper's passing to Mrs Allis-Smith - who had taken him shopping when he was ill - on March 9 2015.

The defendant also included a 'letter of wishes' purportedly from Mr Harper, but it was dated a month before it was supposed to be written, the court heard.

When Johnson was questioned by her defence barrister, Claire Brocklebank, she said she believed specific documents were genuine and denied she'd forged letters.

She told the court: "I did not write this letter or ask someone to write this letter for me. I had no reason to believe that the letter might not be real.

"I thought the note was a will written by John Harper because of the style of writing and because it had his signature at the bottom.

"I did not have any concerns that it might not be real."

However, a jury took three days to find Johnson, of Fenwick Farm in Thwaites, Cumbria, guilty on all charges.

She will be sentenced at Preston Crown Court on Friday (Aug 25).