Boss of industrial abseiling firm on the highs and lows of his unusual career

the Korean conf lict and we had to follow exactly the camouflage design on the side of the ship. That makes you realise this was a weapon and the camouflage was there for a reason. expanded at an incredible rate since he set up Geckotech in 2006.

He said: “The best illustration of how it has grown is that my IRATA No is 6929. So that went from No1 when IRATA was set up in the mid- 80s to my number when I got into it in 2001. In a similar amount of time from then until now, there are in the region of 125,000 registered rope access technicians worldwide.

“If anyone had said then that the business would ever be the size it is now, I would have laughed. I started the business with just me. I had another full-time employee about nine months in.

“Now we are running with 45 full-time staff and about that number again of temporary staff who come in on short-term contracts.” people to drop down every bit of the bridge, inspect it and then apply the five-coat paint system to all the contact points, the bits that were left or couldn’t be blasted and painted while the scaffolding was up. We did about 50,000 of them.

“More recently, we’ve been working on the EGIP line electrif ication project between Glasgow and Edinburgh.”

Whether suspended from the Forth Bridge, dangling from the arches of a viaduct or scaling the walls of Dunvegan Castle on Skye, which features in the film, it isn’t a job for the faint-hearted – but safety is always the No1 priority.

Stephen, who has a young family of three, said: “We work in the construction sector but on steroids at times. The Forth Bridge is a good example. Train movements were live throughout the project, you’ve got the weather to contend with, that structure is extremely exposed and we were using grinders and cutters so we had to put measures in place to make sure we didn’t cut our ropes.

“Nowadays, because I am managing director, I am less on the ropes. But I feel a great responsibility for the guys who work for me and their families as well.

“With rope access, danger is in your face every day. You just learn that our job is to control that high level of risk and, when it is done correctly, it is extremely safe.”