(cont)

Once left to discover the courses for themselves, visitors can enjoy climbing rope ladders, crossing from tree to tree via a number of increasingly challenging means, and can use cargo nets, zip slides and amazon bridges for an impressive view and a fun day spent indulging childish passions for climbing and swinging from trees.

It’s great fun, but there’s a serious element too – for climbers and steeplejacks, it’s a great place to practice using safety equipment, and a particular speciality of the site is working with anyone with a fear of heights – aversion therapy this is not, but rather a gentle, confidence-instilling introduction to heights with the reassurance of at least two safety cables and supportive staff.

Personally, I’ve never been particularly comfortable with heights, but after a thorough briefing and being fitted with a safety harness by one of the ten members of staff at Go Ape! I ventured towards the introductory course and attached my main safety line to the accessory buckle of my harness before attaching the two secondary safety lines and ascending the introductory course. With a longer line which is always attached first and detached last, and an additional line, which clips onto a red guide wire around each of the trees along the course or the crossing wire, and a further zip wire block which guides the lines along each element of the six courses, progress is a little slow at times, but at least 200% safe – extremely important when travelling along the site’s 160m zip wire or when using the site’s Tarzan swing no less than 40 feet in the air!

At all times even the most nervous visitor will feel reassured, and once detaching and reattaching the lines has become second nature, it’s great fun traversing each obstacle along the course with a relaxing, nippy zip wire race down to the ground as a reward for completing each of the six courses.

Each of the six sites is colour-graded according to difficulty, and after completing the initial training site, I rather ambitiously opted to try the number five course, rated black, the most challenging of the whole course with two routes, one slightly higher and more challenging. After a 30ft ascent up a rope latter we crossed from one landing platform to another by means of a Half Trapeze which resulted in an involuntary ‘splits’ manoeuvre on my part and which was less than dignified but somehow not particular scary. Despite nothing beneath my feet but a 30ft drop, the presence of safety lines was reassuring, and naturally there was plenty of encouragement (and the odd giggle) from Jamie as he wielded a camera and watched me trying to regain my composure.