A TEAM of work colleagues have raised more than £5,700 after taking on the three peaks challenge in pouring rain and driving winds.

The team of 14 people from the Banks Group, a North-East property and energy firm, took part in the 24-hour challenge to raise money for Bright Red, a charity supporting people with blood cancers in the North of England.

They started by scaling the 1,345m peak of Ben Nevis in the Scottish Highlands before driving 260 miles down to Scafell Pike in the Lake District.

After completing the second climb, a further 210 miles on the road took the team to its final destination, Mount Snowdon in North Wales.

Bright Red was chosen as the staff’s dedicated charity for 2018 after being nominated by David Wilson, a member of Banks’ ICT team, who was diagnosed with multiple myelomas in 2014.

He was subsequently treated at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, where Bright Red is headquartered, and after receiving two successful bone marrow transplants in 2015, he is now in clinical remission.

Lewis Stokes, community relations manager at The Banks Group, who organised the event, said: “The best thing about the challenge was that no matter how tough things got, or how much we were hurting, the smiles never left our faces and we laughed the whole way round.”

Donations can still be made via the team’s www.justgiving.com/fundraising/banks-group-national-3-peaks-challenge fundraising page.