Text 1: Ninety metres up, by Carys Wynstone

An original contemporary magazine article.

There is a lift inside the tower of a wind turbine, but it is about the size of a telephone box, and it stops short of the top. The last twelve metres you climb by ladder, clipped to a steel rail, while the tower hums and sways gently around you like the mast of a ship. Then you push open a hatch, and you are standing on the roof of the generator housing, ninety metres above the moor.

Kerry Dalton does this on most working days. She is thirty-four, a former car mechanic, and one of a team of eight technicians who look after forty turbines spread across the hills above the town. ‘People ask if I’m scared of heights,’ she says. ‘I tell them I’m scared of falling. That’s different. Heights are fine.’

The work is heavier than I expected. A full toolbag weighs fifteen kilos, and everything has to be winched up or carried. Today a sensor that measures wind speed has failed, which means the turbine has shut itself down and is earning nothing. Kerry and her colleague Sam spend two hours replacing it, kneeling on the roof in harnesses clipped to anchor points, with the wind tugging at their sleeves. Before they climb, they check each other’s harness buckle by buckle, out loud, like pilots before take-off.

From up here the world is reduced to a map. Sheep are white dots. A tractor crawls across a field like a beetle. The blades, each longer than a jumbo jet’s wing, are locked still beside us, but I can still feel them: an enormous patience waiting to turn.

Kerry’s training took two years, and the pay is good. The hardest part, she says, is not the height but the weather. In winter, ice forms on the ladders; in summer, the inside of the housing can reach forty degrees. ‘You don’t do this job for the view,’ she says, and then, looking out at the hills turning gold in the evening light, ‘Although the view helps.’

When the turbine starts again, the blades begin to move with a slow, deep whoosh. Somewhere in the town below, I suppose, a kettle is boiling thanks to a sensor Kerry fixed with her own hands.

Text 2: With the steeplejack, by Matthew Orrell

An original magazine article written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this magazine article, written in 1884, a writer describes watching a steeplejack repair the top of a tall mill chimney.

The chimney of Messrs Crabtree’s mill stands two hundred and ten feet high, and for a fortnight past a crack near its summit has been the subject of anxious talk in every public house in the district. On Monday morning Joseph Bairstow, steeplejack, arrived with his son, a cart of ladders and a coil of rope, and undertook to mend it.

His method of ascent is simple, and to watch it is to suffer. He drives an iron staple into the brickwork as high as he can reach, lashes a short ladder to it, climbs the ladder, drives in another staple, and so on, ladder upon ladder, until the whole chimney is laced from foot to crown. The smoke from the furnaces, which could not be wholly put out, rolled about him as he climbed, so that at times he vanished entirely, and the crowd below, which had grown to several hundreds, fell silent until he appeared again.

By the afternoon he had reached the top, and there, upon a wooden stage no wider than a kitchen table, he sat down and ate his dinner. A boy beside me declared that he could see him waving a pie. I do not doubt it, for Bairstow is famous for his coolness. When I asked him afterwards whether he felt no fear, he said that fear was a thing for the ground, and that a man who took it up the ladder with him would not come down again by the ladder.

For four days he worked aloft, cutting out the cracked brickwork and binding the chimney with iron bands, while his son drew up the materials by rope. The mill hands came out at every meal-time to watch, and the masters too, for if the chimney had fallen it must have crushed the engine house and thrown three hundred people out of work.

On Friday he came down for the last time. The crowd cheered him; he touched his cap, took his pay, and went off to the Black Bull, where I am told he related nothing whatever of his adventure, but talked all evening about pigeons.

Both of these texts are about people who work at great heights.

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