and my head says no oh god that's just a weird such a weird horrible feeling
a couple of weeks ago we made a video about the various victorian attempts to bridge and tunnel
the english channel now we clambered around the cliff edges for the entire day and i was starkly
reminded of my fear of heights or perhaps vertigo now in researching this i came across the langdon
stairs a rather ropey looking zigzag path sat around 18 meters above the beach below
so what better way to attempt to cure this vertigo than to scale the langdon stairs
a quick look on the os maps and you can see the route down flip over to google maps and looking
from this view it really gives you a sense of scale but perhaps this picture really shows
you the sheer slope involved now there isn't a great deal of history to be found on the interweb
save a few references to people falling to their early untimely death but in modern history 1821
seems to be the earliest newspaper reference i can find a man broke his leg
okay wish me luck good luck thank you back in 2016 i think it was rebecca and i went to
wales and we went to Anglesey uh amongst other places now when we were at i
went to i think it was a lighthouse and i started to walk down the cliff edge there on the pathway
and all of a sudden my whole body went to jelly really weird feeling i can't describe
apparently it turned out that's what people refer to as vertigo so i googled vertigo how do you get
over vertigo now a lot of the solutions were all about dizzy your inner ear having problems with
balance dust in your inner ear that sort of thing i thought that i'm not dizzy as such i'm just like
my whole body's going really really weird so yes it's vertigo but perhaps not in a different sense
it just means that when i get near a cliff edge everything goes a bit weird my whole body goes
kind of like jelly so i thought how do we overcome that and as i say i googled that solution which
was apparently to just uh look at something very close to you maybe sort of two meters away so the
vertigo the um i experience in that circumstance is when your your eyes don't necessarily match
with uh the the close proximity surrounding so if you look at something sort of far away and down
it can give you that mixed feeling of vertigo so i thought what better way to try and tackle that
and come down the laying down steps so these are the laying down steps and uh
the bottom part of which collapsed just a few years ago so in order to navigate it you need to
uh go into a tunnel that was built thereafter now already i'm looking down in front of me and
heart rate's getting a little bit high
so first question to you is would you go down laying down steps at the moment
i think i'm okay because i'm talking to you so i'm concentrating at the camera
but if i look to my left i wonder how comfortable i would feel so let's concentrate on the geology
look at this uh layer of flint straight line layer of flute in the uh in the cliff edge there
and i can see ahead of me all these wonderful straight line layers of flint
that's that stuff i don't know how far i'm gonna get people this might be a video
okay what's really tricky about this is i keep on having to stop now because every so often my head
says what if you get vertigo and you have to go back up and you can't because you're just stuck
which is not helpful but nevertheless give me enough fear to question myself and how
how far i should be going down here
bobby fence doesn't help either um okay
there's another one two three four five six zig zags to go and my head says no
i couldn't do it i had a mini panic attack not afraid to uh or ashamed to say that it's just a
thing isn't it how would you get over that kind of vertigo it's not dizzy it's just a feeling of um
sort of panic and wobbliness impending dude impending doom and yeah just sheer wobbliness so
how do you get over that have you been down laying down steps would be amazing to hear your stories
my feeling is that i could do it if i knew what the the the sea time tide times were i've
researched that and i knew there was a way out down the bottom i think i would probably be right
because i think going down's fine but all of a sudden when i started thinking about going back up
that's when it could have hit the most maybe a bit hypnosis what do i can rebecca give it a go
people swear by that yeah they do so you know it's psychological not physical yeah almost
certainly definitely um yeah view right so with this turns into a little video or not i don't know
uh but from the laying down steps near dover love to hear your stories the laying down steps
do you have the kind of vertigo that i have uh have you been down there have you been up them
uh tell us your stories was you're fully expecting to find a tunnel down the bottom
because there is one because even that sign down there says so right see you next time
you