Stuart Maconie
When my acrophobia strikes, it strikes somewhere very specific. And apparently that’s normal…
FANS OF THE police procedural, ravishing landscapes and Douglas Henshall looking soulfully into the middle distance will doubtless be devotees of the TV crime drama Shetland.
I enjoy it too, without any engagement with the plot whatsoever but, as a lover of the Shetland Islands, merely to shout ‘look, there’s Mangaster Voe’ or ‘that’s the café in Hoswick that does the great bannocks!’ from time to time.
Anyway, at the end of episode five of series one, there’s a dramatic shootout on the unbelievably precipitous Calder’s Geo. It’s a staggering place, sheer cliffs fifty metres high plunging to the foaming Atlantic, where lurks a cruciform chamber that is mooted as a contender for Britain’s largest cave: 60ft tall and with an area of 5600 square metres. As I stood on the top of the towering rocks and watched the breakers fill that cave below me, I felt a definite twinge. In a very definitely localised part of the anatomy.
I’d always thought that the somewhat ‘private’ pain I feel when I look down from a great height was personal to me. Very personal, if you get my drift. But in the contemporary manner, I googled it and uncovered something really rather fascinating.
It is in fact an evolutionary vestige, a version of the mechanism that, for instance, brings about hearing loss and tunnel vision during traumatic ‘fight or flight’ situations.
Essentially the nervous system sends a message to the cremaster muscle to retract the male’s, erm, equipment, closer to the body, the better to protect us from injury and to ensure future generations. It’s not a situation we often find ourselves in, except when peering over vertiginous Shetland geos, hence the unusual and uncomfortable sensation.
But this isn’t the only bizarre feeling to do with great heights I once thought unique to me that turns out not to be. In fact one of them was spotted by Edgar Allen Poe in 1845.
That year, Poe published a short story entitled
The Imp of the Perverse. In it, the narrator relates what the imp in our subconscious might want us to do when confronted with a precipitous or sheer drop. “We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss. We grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably, we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape… far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought… it is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height.”
I know that feeling. I’ve had it on Illgill Head and Whin Rigg at the top of the Wastwater Screes. I’ve had it on Pembrokeshire cliffs. I guess I’d even get it on Crib Goch or Jack’s Rake if ever I was foolhardy enough to go there. Some weird, curious, transgressive, impish part of the brain wants to know just what it would feel like to be falling through all that empty air. I guess for some people the imp is so persuasive, the impulse so strong, that they engage in bungee jumping or skydiving or another lunatic pursuit.
Of course, to a degree, a fear of heights is both completely understandable and entirely practical. For the avoidance of injury and the continuation of the species, not getting into high and exposed situations is a sensible strategy.
But for some it can become a real hindrance to even sedate walks, and if you poke around online you’ll find people giving advice on the matter. Reassuringly, even some hardy mountaineers and scramblers say that they still suffer from it and sometimes have to take a deep breath or even lie down somewhere safe until the feeling passes. They call it being ‘gripped’.
And as I can tell you after looking down from Calder’s Geo, the gripping is in a very specific place.