Bethany Kingsley-Garner on her time to retire from Scottish Ballet

After that significant time in the limelight, the 36-year-old will retire next week from her role as a Principal at Scottish Ballet, where she has danced for nearly two decades.

For a dancer to spend her whole career with one company is unusual - but makes the wrench of leaving so much more powerful.

"What's extraordinary is that I was an honours graduate from the Royal Ballet School and I came straight here and I stayed here," Bethany said.

"I was taken under the Scottish Ballet wing and I flew with it.

"When I say it's been an absolute honour and a privilege, it's heartfelt because it's just been the most incredible journey - I grew up here and I married, I had a child.

"It's all been within this cocoon of Scottish Ballet, going up through the ranks, seeing different people come and go in the company life.

"And now I'm the only dancer left from my previous director."

Bethany, from Cornwall, began ballet classes as a toddler.

During her older sister's dance lessons, she would have her nose pressed to the window of the studio so the teacher invited her in.

She fell in love, she says, with movement and how her body responded to sound, especially the classical music her mother would play at home.

Bethany said: "It felt as if it was going through my veins, it was taking me somewhere.

"I remember hearing Jupiter from The Planets for the first time and that was breathtaking for me and still is now."

Aged 11 Bethany went to The Royal Ballet School at White Lodge in Richmond Park to train but suffered terribly from homesickness.

She and her mother are incredibly close and Bethany remembers tearing the pocket of her mum's dressing gown to take with her for comfort.

"It's only now I'm a mother myself that I realise the passion and sacrifice she gave by letting me go off to London at that age," Bethany said.

"I was extremely homesick probably for about the first three years. I was home every weekend, so my mum would drive from Devon to London and take me home just for a night, two nights.

"Coming back was hard because we used to have to be dropped off at the gates of Richmond Park and it was dark and we'd get out of the cars and all go in the bus.

"I call it the White Lodge feeling, a feeling of when you're maybe a little bit nervous or anxious and even now sometimes I feel it."

At her final graduate performance from The Royal Ballet School in 2007, the then-Artistic Director of Scottish Ballet, Ashley Page, offered her a contract.

Coincidentally, Christopher Hampson was working at the school as a guest choreographer and it was while Bethany was in the studio with Christopher that she was spotted by Ashley Page.

Christopher is now CEO/Artistic Director of the company and has been a crucial influence in Bethany's life and on her career. Now, in retiring from Scottish Ballet, she hopes to influence a new generation of dancers.

Bethany will take up a role at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland where she already mentors and teaches.

As she has done with younger company members, she looks forward to passing on her experience to the new generation of talent.

She said: "I've also had the injuries, I've also had the let downs; I've also had the burnouts. I've also had the disappointments.

"When you add all those things up now, they are 1% of what I am now. But when things like that happen to a young adult that is 99% of what is happening right now.

"Being able to tell your story always helps, when you look at times when people are anxious or nervous, anything that they could hang on to from someone else's experience is a positive."

Stepping down from her role has brought with it a lengthy period of reflection on her extraordinary time at Scottish Ballet - from dancing Juliet at the Royal Opera House in Hong Kong to becoming involved in the company's many community outreach programmes.

Having joined Scottish Ballet in 2007, Bethany danced her first ever Principal role in 2014 as the Sugar Plum Fair in the Nutcracker when the Principal at the time had to leave the season as she became pregnant.

In a nice piece of symmetry, she discovered she was pregnant with her daughter Elizabeth while dancing the Sugar Plum fairy again.

"I performed Sugar Plum at eight weeks pregnant," she said, "and I took a picture taking the costume off because I knew, all going well, that would be me for a while and possibly forever."

Bethany added: "I gave birth the day the dancers came back after the summer holiday.

"I loved being in the studio and it's something similar to what I feel now, which is I was dancing for no performance purpose and now I'm dancing for no future performance purpose.

"And that's when you find your true reason for doing it, because you've been stripped of everything else."

Elizabeth loves watching her mummy on YouTube and in class. But whether she starts dancing is "completely up to her".

We are in the stalls of the Theatre Royal in Glasgow and the company is mid-way through a rehearsal of Scottish Ballet's Christmas ballet, Cinders, on the stage without costume or set.

"It's hard not to look," Bethany says, graciously, as she catches me peeking - again - at the performers on stage.

"There's something about this music," she adds. "It's so beautiful. I love the stage like this as well. It's raw, isn't it?"

The stage here is where she performed her first role as Principal and she said farewell to it with her final Glasgow performance on December 23.

Bethany said: "I remember being in the wings with my hands in the grate and listening to Waltz of the Flowers and having to physically peel off my hands because I had a need to hold on to something that was solid.

"I was with one of the principals, Eric Cavanagh, who had been an established principal for a long time and he was doing air guitar in the wing opposite.

"And I thought, 'I wonder what that feels like to feel that sense of freedom', and now I get it. I still have nerves but they have changed."

The Glasgow run was a useful test for how she will cope with her final performance in Edinburgh on January 19.

On opening night in Glasgow when the curtain came down Bethany said she thought, "My final phase has started."

She added: "Every night I go out to my curtain call I imagine, 'Beth, what are you going to be feeling with your last one?'

"Each night is a trial run. And I feel my throat. And I feel it in my heart. So I'm prepared as much as you can be."

Bethany is inspired for what might emerge through her new role at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, which has supplied eight dancers to the current Scottish Ballet company.

"I can smell the fresh and the new, what they are doing in that building is so important," she said.

"I think watch the next 10 years. It's going to be an absolute hub of light and talent and is going to be on the map even more now."

She is also travelling to America in the summer to teach and takes private pupils.

Her feet will be glad of a temporary rest after gruelling decades en pointe but the thought of not wearing pointe shoes any more, she says, is like having someone saying, "Oh, just don't brush your teeth tomorrow".

It might sound like an impossible decision to retire after so long - and yet at such a relatively young age - but Bethany is clearly an intuitive person, and it makes sense for a dancer to listen, above all, to their body.

She said: "This moment in time has been in my mind for over a year. I knew this was coming after Snow Queen last year.

"I felt extremely different. I felt more connected to my work and it was hard to keep recreating that feeling of how high I was feeling.

"But physically my recovery was slower. Things don't work the same as they used to and little bits go here and there, so you sort of constantly have little bereavements with your body.

"And so I thought, 'Ok, something's brewing here, I'm loving this feeling, the story. But let me hone in and with me feel what I'm feeling without the emotions'."

A frank chat with Christopher Hampson ensued and he asked some tough questions requiring honest answers.

Bethany decided a forthcoming overseas tour with the company would be too much, as would Scottish Ballet's next performance - Swan Lake.

She said: "Thinking about the next year, I knew I couldn't give it 100% and I love and respect it far too much to even try."

"But I have gone beyond anything I ever could have imagined for myself, for my husband, for my daughter, and I feel warmth from the ballet community.

"I will have to take time and go through the process of whatever this transition is going to bring.

"There'll be quite a bit of grieving I imagine, not the morning after the final performance, but that 10 o'clock ballet class when I'm at home and wondering what they are all doing."