Roy Partington, 53, recently joined a party of six people who were the first to climb a previously unnamed mountain in Mongolia. Roy is married to Belinda and lives in Park South. The couple have two grown-up children and Roy works as a systems administrator with Swindon Silicon Systems

“I JUST enjoy being out in the wide open spaces,” said Roy Partington.

“You know what it’s like when you’ve been at work all week, someone or something’s got you down and you just want to be out on your own.

“Some people like to go fishing; I just like to be out in the big, wide spaces, whether it’s out on my mountain bike, my road bike or running along the Ridgeway or going to Snowdonia, the Brecon Beacons or the Lakes. Just get out there.

“You meet some really interesting characters. I met an old boy last year on the Ridgeway and he was eighty-two years old.

“He was running. He stopped and we were talking for a good 20twenty minutes and I said, ‘You do really well – at your age you look like this.’ He said, ‘I’ll let you into a secret, young ‘un. Sometimes I cheat and have to walk a bit!”

The list of mountains Roy has climbed is long. It includes Aconagua in Argentina, the greatest peak outside Asia, as well as Elbrus in Russia and Kilimanjaro. He has ascended to the Everest base camp, which is a gruelling climb in itself.

Finding his latest climb was as simple as Googling for something literally off the beaten track. The Mongolian peak – the party named it Jochi, which is Mongolian for ‘guests’ and the name of Gengis Khan’s eldest son – is one of the estimated two thirds of the world’s mountains which haven’t been scaled.

The better known mountains tend to be more readily accessible.

“When you’re on those there’s sometimes hundreds of other people around you, and you know you’re only a quick helicopter ride away from hospital.

“For this one a helicopter would take two days to get to us, and that was part of the attraction along with the fact that nobody else had ever summited it before.

“You know that you’re completely in the hands of the people you’re with.”

The mountain is a little less than 4,000 metres and the ascent and descent took 14 hours.

“I’ve not done a lot of glacier traversing, with crampons and ice axes, so as we got higher and the gradient got steeper, up to a 60sixty per cent gradient, it was quite scary.

“I was fine going up and fine coming down, but it was when we were traversing, going sideways across the ice…” Listening to the glacier cracking and shifting beneath his tent was another novel experience.

Roy is from Redcar in the North East. He is one of three siblings born to an oil rig worker and a housewife.

His ambition as a child?

“To be a vet –- I don’t know why – but I was rubbish at biology so it never materialised.”

His other passion was being outdoors, which he loved throughout his childhood. Later, a family member intensified that interest.

“That would have been with my Uuncle, Peter, at probably 16sixteen or 17seventeen. He used to drag me around the North Yorkshire Moors and the Lake District.

“He’d been in the Army all his life – he was orienteering mad. He’s 74seventy-four and still goes out on the North Yorkshire Moors. He does about 15fifteen miles one day and seven or eight miles every other day.

“He dragged me all around, got me into running and keeping fit, going out in the Lake District.

“It’s all his fault, and I think of him quite regularly when I’m stuck in a storm and soaked through. But at the end of the day you get back in the car and you’ve achieved something – you feel good about yourself, really positive when you’re driving back, soaking wet, legs aching.”

From the age of 20 Roy spent four years in a Territorial Army Parachute Regiment battalion.

“I enjoy pushing myself to my extreme. You push beyond what you think you can do.”

In civilian life he was a roofer and oil rig worker as well as spending time tending koi carp on a kibbutz and working at a summer camp in upstate New York.

In the late 1980s, while working as a barman at Butlin’s in Barry Island, he met a young woman called Belinda. When the bar job finished he was on the move again.

“The train was going from Barry Island down to London and then from London back up to the North East. It pulled into Swindon and I thought, ‘Swindon? That’s where that girl was.’ “So I got off and got into a taxi. I hadn’t notified her – I just knocked on the door and that was it.”

They were married less than a year later.

Roy went back to the rigs but stopped after his first child was born. He worked as an HGV driver before moving into IT, a skill he’d picked up while working with some of the first computers used offshore. He never lost his love of the outdoor life, which is how he lately came to take in a view that fewer people have seen than have walked on the Moon.

“There are no words to describe it, really. You’re just looking around – and you’re also worried about the fact that you know when you’re on the summit You’ve only got half of the job done anyway, because you’ve still got to get down.

“If the weather turns in, you’re still in a world of trouble up there.

“There’s not a lot you can do or say – just take it in and appreciate it.”

One of the most treasured of his pictures from that day shows him holding a photograph of his wife and children.

The ascent took about 14 hours there and back. Two previous attempts had been made in recent years, both beaten by bad weather. Roy is well aware that the clichéd life for a man of his age involves taking it easy.

“That’s what I like disproving.

“Just because you’re a certain age it doesn’t mean it’s game over. You do take longer to recover – I ache a lot – but it tells you that you’re alive still.”