LIVING in a landlocked county as far away from the sea as you can possibly get in England didn't stop Ellen MacArthur dreaming of sailing the world's oceans.

Ironically, Ellen, from Whatstandwell, believes that growing up in Derbyshire aided, rather than held back, her ambitions.

"It was bizarre but that's what drove me even harder," she says. "Because it wasn't there, I wanted it so much. I dreamt about it. Maybe if I had lived by the sea it wouldn't have been the same.

"I was so desperate to be on the water but didn't realise at the time how focused I was. It was just me following my course."

By the time she was in her 20s, Ellen was the most famous yachtswoman in the world, finishing second in the Vendée Globe solo round-the-world sailing race in her boat Kingfisher in 2001. Four years later she beat the world record for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe. She came home to a hero's welcome and was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the youngest person to achieve such an honour.

As a child, Ellen thumbed through Swallows And Amazons imagining her own sailing adventures but it was a trip to the seaside as a four-year-old where her course in life was first plotted. "The thing that kicked it off was sailing with my aunt," she says. "We piled down to the East Coast on a train and spent a few days sailing on a little boat she had bought and had spent two years doing up.

"Me, my nan and my brother went down and sailed with her one Easter and that was it, aged four, for me, that four-day trip.

"I couldn't believe the sense of freedom I felt hoisting these tiny triangles of cloth and sailing away. I would have carried on around the world even then."

Instead, Ellen came back to Derbyshire and saved her school dinner money for eight years until she could afford to buy a dinghy.

"Funnily enough I have just found a chart I made at the time," she says. "It was a square of graph paper I had above my money box. I would let the money pile up to a pound, then put it in the box and cross a square off. When I got to 100 squares I would go to the building society and pop my money in. I found the graph the other day among all the things that were stuck on my bedroom wall at home at the time."

Nothing and no one could deter Ellen from taking to the seas but it's only more recently she has been able to see the anxieties she caused her family.

"I didn't realise how hard it was for mum and dad," she says. "You might think it would be great if your daughter sails around the world and ends up in the papers but their biggest worry was my safety. I sailed around Britain at 18, around the world when I was 24 and had no control over what happened, what storms came my way, what could go wrong. My parents were totally helpless. It wasn't even like being in the foothills of the Himalayas where they could have at least flown over to me. It was five days to get me off the boat if something went wrong. That was really hard for them."

But never once did she doubt that she was doing the right thing.

"It was hard but I never thought 'why am I doing this?' I knew exactly why I was out there. I had dreamed of doing it for years and years. Just because you have always wanted to do it doesn't make it easy but I never questioned it, not for a second."

And it wasn't the loneliness that got to Ellen.

"It was the stress and lack of sleep that was the killer," she says. "You know you are going to be on your own and you are so busy it's not an issue. I never thought 'I'm on my own, wouldn't it be nice to see someone' – it never entered my head. It was managing the lack of sleep and the fact that your sleep pattern is totally dictated by the weather, and if it's changeable you can't get any sleep, it's too dangerous. Sleep deprivation is like torture and that's what you are putting yourself through.

The surprise for Ellen was the amount of media attention her voyages received and the way the public took her to their hearts.

"Sailing wasn't much in the media when I was a kid. I have always been passionate about sharing what I'm going through, sometimes to my detriment, but I have always told it like it really is. It would have been easier not to have picked up a camera but I wanted to bring back an actual picture of what it was really like to do what I did. I could have pretended it was all fine and looked a much bigger hero, but it was hard and I showed what you go through mentally and physically when you go around the world. Maybe that passion for communicating is why people followed me so closely."

The result was that Ellen became a celebrity, something she never craved and barely expected.

"One of the hardest things I have done was dealing with that and staying me while all around me had changed," she says. "More and more people are becoming famous because of singing, dancing, whatever it night be – it's something we see on the TV all the time.

"The people who go on shows like X Factor love what they do but want to be famous. Kids grow up these days wanting to be famous but I never wanted that and never looked for that.

"I'm not sure I would say fame was unwanted but it was certainly unexpected. It wasn't easy to deal with. Now I'm older I understand a lot more and I know that you can do an awful lot of good by having a voice."

Ellen, still only 34, has given up competitive sailing and is devoting her time to two charities that have become increasingly important to her.

The Ellen MacArthur Trust, which she started in 2003, takes young people with cancer sailing. She still intends to carry on her work with that but, on September 2, she launches her latest venture; The Ellen MacArthur Foundation. A trip to South Georgia opened her eyes to the dangers facing the planet and her time will now be spent campaigning for a more sustainable future.

The launch of the foundation coincides with the publication of her new book, Full Circle, in which she explains why green issues have forced a change in her life.

"The second half of the book covers that more and more," she says. "Sailing around the world was my dream. I had spent my entire life wanting to do that, since I was four years old. When I finished the Vendee Globe I had achieved that goal which was incredible but also that goal had gone and the moment it disappeared what had been my focus for so long had gone, because I had done it.

"I never thought it was possible to replace that. If you had asked me that five years ago I would have been absolutely convinced that 20 years on I would still be sailing. The book covers my journey from starting to think about a word that I hadn't thought of before – 'sustainability' – and to devoting my life to it.

"It was a huge awakening for me doing research into these resources we are all so dependent on and realising that they would not be around forever.

"Initially, I thought it was 300 or 400 years down the line but the more research I did the more I realised that it was in my lifetime.

"I would love to go around the world again and nothing's going to make that go away but it would be selfish to have that pleasure when there's something far more important out there and morally I can't do that.

"It's like reading the last page of a book and then pretending you haven't seen it."