As one with absolutely no head for heights, I view with dismay the many newspaper photographs appearing these days of adventurous people doing terrifying things at the top of mountains, buildings, cranes and the like.

A week rarely passes without the press carrying one of these shots, which I study in horrified fascination, giddy just thinking about what it must be like to be in the position of danger and the sheer impossibility of my ever getting into it.

One of the most recent (see below) appeared a week or so ago in the Daily Telegraph, and for all I know in other newspapers too.

It showed one Leonardo Edson Pereira, aged 23, dangling by one arm from the granite top of the Pedra de Gavea, almost 3,000 feet above Rio de Janeiro whose skyscrapers feature toylike in the vista below. To the left – and scarcely less petrifying for me – lolls a female friend, her feet dangling over the edge.

Simply getting to the top of the mountain would have demanded significant bravery. A climbers’ website advises: “You are going to have to find hand and footholds to climb up, and don’t look back because although the view is pretty, it’s probably going to scare you. We’re talking 45 degrees or more of an incline.”

Of course, the pioneer contribution to these kind of scary images was the celebrated 1932 study of 11 construction workers sitting without safety harnesses eating their lunch on a girder nearly 900ft over New York.

I had long heard it said that the picture was a fake, but a detailed Wikipedia article supplies chapter and verse concerning its authenticity. The picture was taken on September 20 on the 69th floor of the RCA Building.

A number of the men posing have been identified. It is now believed that the moment was staged, to promote the new skyscraper.