Teenage Chesterfield rope engineer becomes youngest woman ever to abseil down Heathrow’s highest control tower

Ruby Revill, 18, dangled from ropes below the top of the control tower on Thursday last week while safety-checking the structure’s eye bolts – which window cleaners are often suspended from. On this occasion she was suspended from bolts within the tower itself, which had already been checked.

Ruby qualified as a level one IRATA rope engineer in October and works for dad Dan Elsmore and uncle Jack Elsmore at family business Spire Access. The Heathrow job was by far the highest altitude Ruby has worked at – having gone no further than around 25 metres before.

Speaking about the experience, she said: “When I first looked down out the hatch it was really scary but my uncle went first and as soon as I saw he was alright I was fine. I like an adrenaline rush – I just find it so fun. When you’re up there it’s just so fun and the view is amazing. We’re always driving to London for work and sometimes we travel to Ireland.”

Ruby was inspired to follow in the family footsteps during visits to Go Ape with her dad as a child. However she added: “Qualifying was really, really hard. You do a lot of pulling your own weight around and I’m not that strong.

"I’m quite short and so some of the parts where you have to clip yourself to the ceiling I wasn’t tall enough to reach but I did a lot of weight training with my dad.”

As well as being the youngest person ever to abseil down Heathrow’s highest tower Ruby is only the second woman to do it. She said: “More girls should be influenced to do what is essentially seen as a man’s job.

"You don’t hear about these types of jobs as a girl – no-one tells girls at school about apprenticeships at Forgemasters or scaffolding, for example. There seems to be a stigma around it.”