Stilts against the village-hall wall

The stilts were already leaning against the brick when the question came. Village fete, the long wall of the hall, a coil of bunting dumped at the foot of the poles. A father with a half-twisted 260Q sword in one hand and a toddler on his shoulders leaned over the tombola noise and asked it plainly: how high are those things, really? He meant the poles, and behind the poles the whole trade of standing taller than your own audience. This note takes the plain meaning first, because the honest answer is a range, and the range is set by the room far more than by anyone's ambition.

What a working stilt actually is

Peg stilts, first, because that is what was leaning there: two poles, a footplate fixed where the working height lives, a strap over the instep, a longer binding above the calf, the whole rig ending somewhere below the knee. The toy-shop version, wooden blocks on a cord you hold in your fists, belongs at the bottom of the garden; nobody walks a fete crowd on it. What you actually meet at fetes, school fairs and small circus shows runs from about 18 inches of lift to about 3 feet, with the solid everyday working height sitting near 2 feet. The adjustable stilts plasterers buy in tool shops overlap the low end of that range, which tells you something: this is balance equipment first and costume second. Taller poles exist, in parades and in big-top spectacles, but a fete lawn is not a parade route, and the crowd a walker works is at knee height.

What sets the height indoors?

A door frame sets it. A standard internal door in Britain stands 6 foot 6, and the lintels of the average village hall sit not much above it; put a performer of about 5 foot 10 on 2-foot poles and the top hat is already negotiating with the woodwork. Ceilings in the older halls run 9 or 10 feet, and they are not empty: pendant lights, strip heaters, and the bunting that someone strung across at exactly the height a tall hat forgets. The school gym is generous and echoey, the church hall is often beamed, the marquee is a forest of poles and guy ropes. So the indoor rule comes down to a sentence: the working height is the lowest lift that buys the sightline without borrowing trouble from the ceiling. Every extra inch is paid for in stability, and the crowd below pays with it.

The wall is part of the kit

Nothing about the leaning wall is accidental. You mount by leaning: back to the brick, poles in the hands, one foot up onto its plate, the strap settled, then the second, then a slow push to standing while the wall takes the load your calves are about to inherit. Brick is honest, painted render is honest, a chair-back will serve, a helper's shoulder will serve better. Ivy, glass, and the noticeboard with the hall's insurance certificate pinned to it will not. The wall is also where the work ends, and this is the part spectators never see whole: the last minute of a walkabout, the true end of its running order, is the search for a safe place to lean and come down, because descent on tired legs is the riskiest passage of the day. The photographs show the walk. The craft is in the getting up and the getting down.

What the paperwork asks for

The paperwork is thinner than the practice, but it is not empty. Equity, the performers' union, keeps pages for its circus and variety members that treat balance skills as trained work, with insurance guidance to match, and a fete booking will usually ask for the public liability certificate before it asks for anything else. The council's event safety sheet, the short standard annex that travels with a pitch licence or a fete approval, wants the act named, the surface described, and the risks written down; a competent risk assessment for stilts mentions the mounting point, the descent, the surface, and the rule about not working directly above small children. Where schools are involved the DBS check rides along in the same folder. None of this paper states a height. It assumes the performer already knows what this note is trying to write down.

What does the height buy?

From the back of a fete crowd, an adult standing on the flat disappears behind the third row of pushchairs. Two feet of stilt puts a hat above the ice-cream queue and a face into every sightline at once, and that is the whole argument for the skill. The comparison worth holding in mind is the 20-inch unicycle wheel, which lifts its rider barely a foot off the ground and earns its living at every village fair on that foot alone. Stilts buy two or three times the lift and spend it differently: not on tricks but on reach, on being the landmark a lost child can be pointed towards, on the slow comedy of handing a twisted 260Q sword down to someone knee-high to you. A walkabout is a conversation held at a height, and the height is chosen so the smallest person in it still gets the joke.

Where the file goes quiet

Here is what the record does not say. The National Fairground Archive holds photographs, programmes and business records covering more than a century of fairground life, and stiltwalkers appear in them, but a photograph does not annotate its own pole height and a programme bills the act without the measurements. No trade-body page fixes a standard working height, because there is none to fix: the number lives in door frames, ceiling beams and the memory of whoever last worked the room, and it is relearned in every new hall. The valise carries the poles, the pump, the bag of modelling balloons; the published record carries none of the numbers that fill a working afternoon. What it does carry is the lineage, the fact that people have done this at fairs for generations, which is a different kind of answer, and an honest one.

A thing to do at the next fete

Stand at the back, past the tombola, where the father stood, and watch the stiltwalker's eyes rather than the stilts. They go to the ground more often than to the crowd: to the surface, to the toddler breaking from a parent's hand, to the bunting line, to the wall being measured for the descent. That is the working height being policed in real time. Then, if you help run the hall, ask to see the risk assessment for the booking; it is a public-spirited document, it names the mounting point, and reading it teaches more about the craft in five minutes than an afternoon spent watching from the front.