I’ve never been one for grand, courageous acts of daring. My idea of an adrenaline-charged, life-affirming endeavour, for instance, is nervously straddling a barbed wire fence on a ramshackle, skitey stile during a bracing stride in the country.

It was during one of these potentially calamitous, wobbly, cock-legged crossings recently that I realised two things. Firstly, a neatly folded Ordnance Survey Map in my back pocket wouldn’t spare me from the agonising ravages wrought by that splintered stile and, secondly, the humble sheep possesses a far more valiant sense of intrepid adventure than this correspondent ever will.

Look at them? They could settle for the abundant lush grasses of the safe, sprawling terrain on ground level but off they go, trotting their woolly, shoogling selves on to a treacherous, rocky precipice high above the flock to bah, meh and chomp their way through various clumps of perilously positioned vegetation while adopting the kind of nonchalant approach to danger that would have had Evel Knievel peering up and saying “sod that boys, I’ll just stick to hum-drum loupings over 20 London buses, a tank of flesh-eating zombies and a vat of shark-infested molten lava.”

The sight of our quadrupedal ruminant friends risking cloven hoof in the pursuit of cud-chewing daredevilry really is an inspiration to us all. Well, that’s what I consoled myself with as I removed the splinters from my Ordnance Survey Map.

This rather head-scratching combination of rickety, rural stiles, indomitable sheep and star-spangled stuntmen got me thinking of motorcycles - obviously - and the inherent perils of said contraptions. The first port of call? Why it would have to be the point-and-chortle magnificence of Kickstart, in which Peter Purves invited trial bike enthusiasts to rev their way over some stationary Ford Cortinas, bunny-hop about on oil drums and perform a wheelie over the finishing line of a Heath Robinson-inspired layout in a sprawling country estate near Towcester.

Who can forget, for example, the sight of 10-year-old Mark Scofield coming a cropper on Junior Kickstart while attempting to negotiate the ‘Pole over the Hole’ obstacle and enduring a wincing meeting betwixt nether regions and handle bars before the St John’s Ambulance crew came tumbling and careering on to the scene in a comical caper for the ages?

“He hurt his pride and almost destroyed his manhood, but the ensuing rush of ambulance men into the pit, where they all fell over, was a piece of television hysteria,” recalled Purves amid sympathetic guffawing. The hapless Scofield, meanwhile, still has one eye that permanently waters. And he can’t get over stiles.

Kickstart was more about canny motor bike manipulation and cajoling rather than flat out speed. And that brings us nicely into the quite jowl-shuddering world of sidecar racing, which is all about manipulation, cajoling and flat out speed.

The idea of a motorbike and sidecar has always conjured up a giddy mix of images. The first is of the Action Man toy one you perhaps got during those carefree times of yore when you could recreate the movements of two members of a mobile British Army division transporting a Vickers machine gun into the Battle of Neuve Chapelle over the linoleum of the kitchen floor.

The second is of a cheery couple enjoying a Sunday trundle, perhaps along the scenic A4069 in the Brecon Beacons, and pulling over in a layby to enjoy a flask of tea, a meat paste sandwich and some nice views while Irene re-organises her breeze-buffeted head square and Ronnie stands peering at the drive chain of his Norton and suggests that “when we get back dear, remind me to get George to have a look at that sprocket” before asking if there are any Bakewell Tarts left.

Sidecar racing, meanwhile, combines the death-round-every-corner potential of warfare with none of those tranquil pleasures enjoyed by the aforementioned Irene and Ronnie. When it’s played out in the raw, rugged arena of the Isle of Man then it’s even more terrifying. Sidecar racing remains a truly bold adventure; a brave, on the edge exercise in fearless commitment, skill, concentration, cohesion and slight insanity.

At certain angles, it resembles an extreme and mechanised version of the Gay Gordons as the passenger in the spartan sidecar clings on for dear life and performs a variety of weight-shifting manoeuvres while the driver prepares to slingshot his way round a corner. By the end of this quite torturous, backside-scraping-the-asphalt tumult, the passenger’s limbs and joints must feel like they’ve been loosened with a rusting Allen Key while his pummelled internal organs will look like something you’d see in a tray in a butcher’s window. It’s a brilliantly captivating spectacle. That gap-toothed, ukulele-strumming Lancastrian, George Formby, once starred in a black-and-white jaunt about the motor cycling TT called No Limit. Turned out nice again? Not when you’re hurtling towards a drystane dyke in a bloomin’ sidecar.