LOTTO millionaire Marion Richardson is buying football star Craig Bellamy's luxury mansion.

The European Lottery winner is paying the Premiership player £1.7m for his rural home.

Mrs Richardson, a mother-of-five whose £16.7m jackpot was the sixth highest in British history, believes she has found her dream home.

When she moves into the exclusive Northumberland estate, she will have Newcastle star Lee Bowyer as a neighbour.

Speaking from her home in Low Fell, Gateshead, the 58-year-old said she was desperate to move before Christmas.

She said: "I have been looking for my dream home for ages and as soon as I saw it, I thought, 'Right, this is it, I'm having it'.

"I did not want to buy the first place I saw just for the sake of it. It had to be somewhere I felt comfortable and happy living in, and when I saw the house, that was it.

"I just fell in love with it and knew it was the perfect dream home I had been searching for."

Newcastle striker Bellamy's home, near Morpeth, Northumberland, is set in one-and-a-half acres of land.

Described as one of the most impressive modern mansion houses in the North-East, it has an orangery, cocktail bar, gymnasium, sauna and swimming pool, garden and electrically-operated gates.

The lavish mansion is a far cry from the £40,000 three-bedroomed council house Mrs Richardson shared with her daughter Kaye, 25, in Winlaton, Gateshead, for ten years.

Soon after she won on the Euro Millions in April, she bought a four-bedroomed semi-detached house in nearby Low Fell.