Theme park manufacturers all over the world are always striving to design the fastest, highest, scariest ride possible but which of the rides currently in action in the UK is the scariest?

Having travelled the world riding the biggest and best rollercoasters ever built, I feel that I am qualified to give my opinion but firstly we need to decide what actually constitutes a scary ride?

Is a scary ride one that makes you scared due to the sinister graphics of ghosts and ghouls painted on the walls? Is it the one that throws you around so much that your bones rattle? Or is it the one that goes so fast that you feel like you’re in the cockpit of a fighter jet? For me, it’s a mixture of all of these things.

According to a recent survey the top 10 scariest rides in the UK are:

• Stealth at Thorpe Park
• Th13teen at Alton Towers
• SAW Alive Horror Maze at Thorpe Park
• Velocity at Flamingo Land
• The Big One at Blackpool Pleasure Beach
• Oblivion at Alton Towers
• Apocalypse at Drayton Manor
• Rita at Alton Towers
• The Ultimate at Lightwater Valley
• Detonator at Thorpe Park

Now having ridden all of these rides at some point in my life, I am afraid to say that there’s some rides that are about as scary as a pair of freshly washed socks. The list is full of rides that have been made to appear scary through use of clever marketing and television advertising that makes us perceive that the ride will be scary before we even ride it. This is something that wasn’t around in the old days.

The only PR an old fashioned roller coaster would get would be the playground stories and urban myths about a boy who fell out of his carriage on the loop the loop or a kid who’s restraint didn’t close properly and as the ride set off he was thrown backwards and smashed into a million pieces. These stories were more than enough to scare even the bravest of souls.

These days for me, the best rides are to be found in Europe or America, but as for the scariest ride currently in the UK, I wouldn’t like to say but I would recommend riding the full list of ten and making your own mind up.