A regional daily journalist defied fog, rain and doctor’s advice to climb the UK’s highest mountain for charity.

Rachel Butler of the Derby Telegraph took part in a sponsored climb of Ben Nevis to raise cash for the Alzheimers Society.

The climb took place in the middle of the night and at one point Rachel admitted she had “no idea where the summit was.”

To add to the challenge, Rachel was recovering from an attack of pleurisy and had been advised not to take part in the climb by her doctor.

Rachel, pictured above, described her experiences in a first-person piece in the Telegraph.

She wrote: “I’d been so excited about climbing Ben Nevis for months. It was in March when I signed up to do it. That same month, my family had been given the heartbreaking news that my amazing nanna – one of my most favourite people in the world – had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, a condition where the brain cells die, leading to severe memory loss.

“I felt so useless not being able to cure my nanna, so I decided to raise money for Alzheimer’s Society, a brilliant charity that has helped my family tremendously.

“It was raining as we began the ascent and it didn’t seem like the rain was going to stop. I had to power through. After three-and-a-half hours of climbing, I got to the stony plateau where I couldn’t see a thing. I was so close to the summit, but mentally it still felt so far.”

Rachel finally arrived at the summit at 2.30am. “That was the moment, despite being 5ft 3ins, that I towered above everyone in the United Kingdom. It was the moment for which I had trained hard, going from no exercise at all to exercising at least four times a week,” she wrote.

In the piece, Rachel also recalled that four days before the climb she thought she would have to pull out.

“I’d had an asthma attack a few days previous and couldn’t get rid of a chest pain every time I breathed in. So I went to see my GP, who told me exactly what I didn’t want to hear: “It’s pleurisy. I would suggest that you don’t climb Ben Nevis on Friday,” she wrote.

“But I’d managed to raise £1,200 in sponsorship – there was no way I was going to back down.”

To sponsor Rachel for her Ben Nevis challenge go to www.justgiving.com/rachel-butler2.