5 TIPS to fight your fear of heights
IN 1802 Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a friend of William Wordsworth, took the ‘wrong way’ off Scafell in the Lake District and made an accidental descent of Broad Stand, an experience that “put my whole limbs in a tremble, and… I began to suspect that I ought not to go on.” He “shook all,” began to “laugh at myself for a madman,” and fixated on falling backwards off a narrow ledge to his death.
More than two centuries later, hillwalkers of all ages, genders and levels of experience can still relate to Coleridge’s fears and anxieties. There is nothing abnormal, however, about a fear of heights. It is a natural, evolutionary instinct important to survival – but it affects some people more than others. As its worst, it can
