ABSTRACT
Some people reap more benefit from fear than others. There are different degrees of knowing what it’s like. Some have ‘been there’ more often. Fear is rarely experienced in isolation and so it occurs in combination with a number of sensations, emotions and understandings: excitement, exhilaration, panic. Risk, recreation and rescue are equally amongst them. The idea here is to focus on the micro-scale ways in which these last three topics unite. Elaborating upon such elements at the level of everyday life will act as a means to support conceptual statements that are not about the nature of any of these per se but about the embodied imagination. This chapter thus provides an ethnographic account of the more extreme and dangerous manifestations of coastal exploration. This includes climbing up sea cliffs but the focus will mostly be upon an activity that involves clinging to the rock faces of such cliffs and jumping from them in order to pierce through the surface of water after a brief moment of free-fall. Such cliff jumping (or ‘tombstoning’) along the shores of Britain’s Cornish peninsula forms the main setting. The material for consideration derives mostly from participant observation and the more contrived post facto narratives composed by informants, sometimes years since they last took part in the activity.
