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Hidden among the cow pastures and rolling meadows of Somerset, in the Southwest of England, Middlemoor Water Park features a muddy man-made waterskiing pond, a go-kart track, and a shack selling beer and snacks. But on November 24, 2002, Middlemoor’s main attraction was somewhat more exotic: in a clearing behind the gravel parking lot stood a replica of a trebuchet—a medieval catapult—looming like an oil derrick against the sky. Twenty-six feet tall at rest, made of steel and rough timber, the trebuchet was, according to its builder, a onetime motorcycle salesman and scrapyard owner named David Aitkenhead, “a big, evil, savage-looking contraption.” On this day, the machine was being prepared to violently hurl willing human beings several stories high and into a net 100 feet away.

It was a warm day and a crowd of at least 30 had gathered to watch the trebuchet in action. Most were Oxford University student members of the Oxford Stunt Factory, a private alternative- and extreme-sports club. They had arrived in a caravan organized by the head of the club, David “Ding” Boston. The majority had come as spectators. A handful, however—including an enthusiastic 19-year-old freshman biochemistry student from Bulgaria named Kostadine “Dino” Iliev Yankov—were intent on taking a turn.

The proceedings got rolling as the first daredevil was placed in the trebuchet’s sling and then flung in a perfect, arcing parabola into the center of the net, which sat atop 26 stout telegraph poles on the other side of the clearing. Four more successful throws followed. “There was a half-hour between jumps,” remembers Boston, who was videotaping the event from a position beyond the landing area. “It was really a question of keeping yourself busy as they adjusted the weights.”

Finally, it was Yankov’s turn. “I was looking through the video lens,” says Boston, “and I saw the same thing I had seen on the previous throws except that, the moment when I expected him to come into the viewfinder, there was nothing. And then, milliseconds later, a very dull, heavy thud.”

Yankov’s body had missed the net by inches and come crashing to the earth, where he now lay in a broken heap. “You expected to see one of the bearings broken, or a wheel rolling away, or the net hanging, or something,” Boston says. “But there was just Dino, on the ground, making the most ghastly, guttural sounds.”

A helicopter arrived and rushed Yankov to a hospital in Bristol. But the catapult had sent him on a trajectory equivalent to being thrown over a house. By 7:30 P.M. he was dead. Aitkenhead and his partner, Richard Wicks, were arrested eight days later and were eventually charged with manslaughter. Their trial will take place sometime this year.

The sad story made a few headlines in the English papers and would likely have died as a three-line item in “news of the weird” blogs around the world if it hadn’t been for the fact that Aitkenhead and Boston share a distinguished pedigree. Both men served time in the Dangerous Sports Club, a gathering of brilliant and adventurous souls that came together in Oxford in the late 70s and, in a burst of imagination, mischief, and style, more or less invented the world of alternative sports. In the decade when it burned brightest, the D.S.C. pioneered hang gliding, invented bungee jumping, sent a grand piano down the slopes at Saint-Moritz, Switzerland, and generally raised a good deal of witty, iconoclastic hell on several continents before going the way of all things that start out new and exciting and then inevitably run their course. The trebuchet accident was a tragic coda to this history, though exactly when—and if—the saga of the D.S.C. came to an end is among the most contentious questions of all.

“The idea of getting bungee cord and jumping off the bridge came up. And I thought, Yes. Why not?”

At the beginning, middle, and end of any history of the Dangerous Sports Club is the inspiring, infuriating figure of David Kirke, its chairman, guiding spirit, and only member-for-life. In many ways, Kirke is the prototypical Oxford man. Born in 1945, he was the eldest of seven children. His father was a schoolmaster, and his mother was a concert pianist. The family wintered in Switzerland and summered in France, employed 15 servants, and drove around in a vintage Rolls-Royce—all at the last moment of British history when it was possible to enjoy such luxuries and still be considered middle-class. In 1964, Kirke entered Oxford’s Corpus Christi College to study psychology and philosophy.

He was pursuing a graduate degree in 1977 when, along with fellow Oxford graduate student Edward Hulton, he set off for Saint-Moritz to give the famous Cresta Run toboggan track a whirl. The two men shared a distaste for anything in sport that smacked of professionalism. “What we hated was the way that formal sports had all these little, important bourgeois instructors saying, ‘You’ve got to get through five-part exams to do this,’” Kirke says. The Cresta—exciting, but not truly dangerous—didn’t cut it. Looking elsewhere, the two traveled to the Swiss resort of Klosters and met a young man named Chris Baker, the genial, ski-bum scion of a department-store family in Bristol, who was experimenting with hang gliders.

The first generation of gliders had only recently begun to arrive from California. It was a signal moment for do-it-yourself adventurers. “Hang gliding was a very significant departure,” says Hugo Spowers, an engineer and ex-racecar designer who later concocted some of the D.S.C.’s more fantastical devices. “It set the tone for an awful lot of possibilities whereby the boundaries of human experience could be pushed back, for very small sums of money, by amateurs.”

For Kirke, Baker’s flying machines were a revelation. “Awestruck,” he writes in his sprawling, unfinished history of the D.S.C., “we realized that someone out there ... had built something that was so beautiful, so absolutely beyond bureaucracy and so totally dependent on using one’s faculties that it was a work of art within an infinite frame.” With characteristic bluster, Kirke convinced Baker that he was an experienced flier. After a fine takeoff and a less than fine landing, the men retired to a bar. There, over drinks (it’s safe to assume that nearly any significant conversation concerning the D.S.C. was held over drinks), the idea of a Dangerous Sports Club was born. It would be committed, says Baker, “to going and doing somewhat silly or dangerous things which were fun and would annoy bureaucrats.” In true Oxonian style, there would even be a club tie: a silver wheelchair, with a blood-red seat, set on funereal black.

Back in Oxford, the new club’s members set about planning a series of “away days”: a “Tes-co Cresta Run” down very steep hills in shopping carts (this, 20 years before Jackass); running with the bulls at Pamplona while riding skateboards and carrying umbrellas; an aborted attempt to jump a car across Tower Bridge’s open drawbridge. These were interspersed with more ambitious trips, including hang-gliding expeditions off of Mount Olympus (the first ever from that peak) and Mount Kilimanjaro. The abiding principle on all of these outings, says Kirke, was “one-third recklessness of innocence, tempered with two-thirds recklessness of contempt.”

Meanwhile, the club’s twin motifs of formal dress and abundant champagne were quickly set, and its growing reputation was attracting an eclectic group of Oxford undergraduates that included Alan Weston, an engineering student who went on to become one of the U.S. Air Force’s top rocket scientists; Tim Hunt, who is now an agent for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and Phillip Oppenheim, a future member of Parliament and Treasury minister. “It was a very bleak period in England,” says Xan Rufus-Isaacs, an early member who is now an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles. “Thatcher had taken over. There was the whole punk movement. There was a very nihilistic atmosphere. And David was saying, ‘Let’s go do some stunts and stuff.’ It seemed to be something interesting and different and, apart from anything else, humorous.”

The press predictably ate up the image of renegade bluebloods, but it was only half true. The D.S.C. included the upper crust (Xan Rufus-Isaacs is more properly Lord Alexander Rufus-Isaacs, and another member, Tommy Leigh-Pemberton, who later died in a car accident, was the son of the governor of the Bank of England) but also members from the middle and working classes. Still, the class symbols were a potent form of branding. “We consciously pushed buttons that were English, specifically Oxford English,” says Martin Lyster, who joined the club later and wrote the book The Strange Adventures of the Dangerous Sports Club. “If you’re photographed with a bottle of champagne in your hand, it’s not entirely an accident.”

In 1983, Hugo Spowers had the idea for a bike race down the Matterhorn mountain in the Alps. The cyclists naturally would have parachutes to help them navigate the terrain. From there, it was a small step to sending all kinds of strange objects down the slopes, leading to the D.S.C.’s second great legacy: the surreal ski races.

“Think Fellini” was Kirke’s instruction, and indeed the collection of vehicles that arrived in Saint-Moritz that winter would have pleased the director. They ranged from an ironing board, a baby carriage, and a tandem bicycle to a grand piano, a Louis XIV dining set, and a full crew boat, seating eight people. All were mounted on skis, and all provided magnificent crashes. “Kirke knocked himself unconscious by taking a C5 [electric scooter] down the slope,” says Mark Chamberlain, who—improbably, considering the company—had earned the nickname Mad Child for his willingness to try anything. “He must have been clocking about 95 m.p.h. They were quite suicidal machines, really.”

The accompanying parties were equally wild, even by club standards. In attendance was the club’s mascot, Eric, a life-size mannequin in a full-body cast with an impressive hard-on. “It was incredibly hedonistic,” says Chamberlain. “I remember Hugo Spowers swinging on a chandelier at the Park Hotel in Saint-Moritz and it coming crashing down. We were setting off C1 explosive charges everywhere. It got to the point where we were jumping off the bar, trying to get into a cart filled with ice.”

The race was repeated in 1984 and 1985 with ever more elaborate devices, culminating in an aborted attempt to send a London double-decker bus down the slopes. Rufus-Isaacs had purchased the bus, and the group drove it to Saint-Moritz with great fanfare, attracting gawkers all along the way. Echoes of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were entirely apt; with the psychedelic revolution spent, the D.S.C. had taken the same impulse and found a way to turn it outward, pushing the boundaries of experience with their bodies rather than their minds, while tweaking authority and having a grand time doing it. It was perhaps their last truly great moment.

‘I am absolutely hopeless at business,” David Kirke says. By all accounts, this is a vast understatement. As the 80s rolled on, the question of making some sort of living inevitably began to plague the D.S.C. The bungee-jumping exhibitions—organized by Chamberlain and Martin Lyster—were bringing in some money, but the club was also searching for alternative sources of income. One plan involved branding a vintage of D.S.C. wine, complete with a label depicting a ski-jumping waiter. This scheme ended with predictable results once the crates of wine arrived at club headquarters.

Another idea was to open club membership to the public. “We’d get these people who were willing to pay 50 quid a year so they could have a card that said, ‘I’m a member of the D.S.C.,’” says Lyster. “We were grateful for their money. They came to the parties. And a few even got involved and became active members.” David Aitkenhead was among them.

Aitkenhead had left school at 15 and ended up working in a Harley-Davidson dealership in Somerset, selling spare parts. In 1984 he happened to catch a screening of The History of the Dangerous Sports Club and was entranced. A year later he sent in his £50 and began tagging along on bungee jumps.

Even as a newcomer, Aitkenhead sensed that the original club was unraveling. “By the time I came along,” he says, “a lot of the early members had gone. They were getting married, getting good jobs.”

One by one, Kirke’s Prince Hals were returning to the straight world. “David used to say that the one thing that united us all was a fear of a regular job,” says Rufus-Isaacs. “It’s a nice student ideal, but you can’t fucking live like that.”

Those who remained were finding the relationship with Kirke increasingly strained. “Martin and I would go all over the place doing these shows and we would see fuck-all of the money,” says Chamberlain, now a cinematographer who works with Aardman Animation, in Bristol. (Kirke responds, “Every single penny we made with the D.S.C. would go out to every member of the D.S.C.”)

There were bigger projects—a helium-filled kangaroo floating across the Channel, a hang-gliding expedition to Ecuador, a doomed effort to send a giant inflatable “melon ball” (courtesy of Midori) across the Thames—but these all required well-heeled sponsors, a class of people Kirke was almost pathologically adept at pissing off. “I think he had a fear of success,” says Chamberlain. “Whenever things looked like they were going properly, he’d panic and make sure there was a complication.”

Hugo Spowers went as far as to begin organizing his own group, the Alternative Sports Club. “I got very frustrated with his spectacular ability to bugger things up all the time,” says Spowers. “You won’t see a sponsor who’s dealt with the D.S.C. twice.” Kirke responded with an angry volley of legal threats, and Spowers backed down. “He’s fantastically creative, particularly when he’s trying to destroy something,” Spowers says.

Kirke’s fierce sense of proprietorship continues to this day. When he discovered that Lyster was publishing a book that would pre-empt his own, unfinished account of the club’s history (for which Kirke had received an advance from Penguin Putnam in 1989), he responded with the fury of a stung bear. His enemies “suspect I’m walking wounded and, like hyenas, they can bite pieces off me and slink away,” he wrote to Hubert Gibbs, a longtime D.S.C. member unlucky enough to have assumed the role of club “arbiter of fair play.” To Chris Baker he wrote, “To draw an analogy, anyone who volunteers for the British army who then volunteers for the I.R.A. knows it’s within the terms of the game that he will be hunted down for treason and killed on sight by former colleagues.” Later in that letter, Kirke got more to the point: “But then you see that (despite all my efforts to spread the load) it has been one man’s story throughout, even if it has been a memorable chapter or two in over 40 people’s lives.”

“When you get on David’s shit list,” says Lyster, “you get shit by the truckload.”

But above and beyond personal and financial difficulties, the Dangerous Sports Club’s biggest problem in the late 80s was simply that it was losing creative steam.

“There’s a huge difference between being a group of friends having a laugh and then basically having to perform at given times,” says Chris Baker. “Risking my life for my own entertainment was fair enough, but being a badly paid stuntman struck me as the worst of both worlds.”

When Kirke struck a deal with a Japanese TV company in 1988 to produce a movie that would combine several new stunts with old footage, one of the few people left for him to turn to was David Aitkenhead. Aitkenhead quit his job and moved into a rented hangar in Shropshire to construct machines for the new stunts. One of these was a human catapult.

The Japanese film was eventually completed, but it was not without its costs. One ill-conceived segment involved rolling the now repurposed Midori melon ball down a mountain in Scotland. With a 20-knot wind blowing upward, the sphere quickly pulled loose of its moorings and ripped itself to shreds. More seriously, another stunt called for Kirke to be shot off a cliff in Ireland by a device used to launch drones from aircraft carriers. The team had ordered a specially molded seat to protect Kirke’s back from the fearsome g-forces, but when it didn’t arrive in time, Kirke went ahead with an improvised seat of foam and duct tape. Slow-motion footage of the shot shows Kirke nearly flattened as he’s thrust forward, and the stunt left him with serious back injuries.

As if to underline the end of an era, Kirke’s past sins also began catching up with him. After an incident involving a borrowed American Express card (Kirke claims it had more to do with some political intrigue involving Dick Cheney), he was charged with fraud and, several months later, fled to France. Spowers and Rufus-Isaacs tracked him down there, where he was sleeping on the floor of an unheated farmhouse. Eventually, Kirke served four and a half months of a nine-month sentence. “I had a sabbatical,” he says, “much enjoyed and appreciated.”

Meanwhile, two New Zealand entrepreneurs had begun offering bungee jumping to the paying public. Soon Aitkenhead had started one of the first commercial bungee operations in the U.K. In Oxford, Ding Boston, who had been peripherally involved with the D.S.C. until falling out with Kirke, created the Oxford Stunt Factory, which marketed alternative sports to students and staged bungee stunts for TV and film. What had been the D.S.C.’s ultimate anarchic expression was well on its way to becoming the thrill of choice for a generation of midlife-crisis sufferers—organized, bureaucratic, and very profitable.

Aitkenhead rode the boom for several years—at one point jumping as many as 400 people per weekend. Under the D.S.C. flag, he and a partner also found time to sail a modified septic tank across the Channel—a stunt that lacked something of the panache of classic D.S.C. events, though Kirke still showed up in France to buy a round of drinks. As the bungee market grew saturated, Aitkenhead got out and opened a scrapyard in Somerset.

Visions of a human catapult, however, stuck with him. The device in the Japanese film had been a Roman-style catapult, with a seat on the beam. Aitkenhead himself, looking somewhat awkward in the requisite top hat and tails, had been thrown off it into an Irish river. But a Roman catapult, Aitkenhead and Richard Wicks quickly determined, would not be sufficient to send customers the desired distance: 100 feet. For that, they would need a trebuchet, a far more powerful machine that uses a sling to transfer more energy to its missile.

In the early 1990s, an eccentric Englishman named Hew Kennedy had built an enormous trebuchet on his Shropshire estate. He was making news by flinging old cars, dead cows, and burning pianos into an empty field. Aitkenhead visited several times, at first to see whether the huge machine could be used to fire humans (the g-forces, Kennedy told him, would kill a person) and then to gather tips for his own, smaller version.

Construction began on weekends in the front yard of Aitkenhead’s countryside home. After several months, the men had created a machine capable of throwing a 100-kilogram test weight 100 feet. “We thought, Right, that’s the difficult bit done. But little did we realize that what we’d done was the easy bit,” says Aitkenhead. A year passed, spent experimenting with nets. Finally, the two decided that it was time for a test run. “I was happy for Richard to be the first man to do it, and it worked beautifully. Then, the next day, I did it and it worked beautifully again.”

In 2000, Richard Wicks’s girlfriend, Stella Young, was thrown. The throw itself was perfect, but Young bounced out of the net and broke her pelvis, making nationwide headlines. With help from Kirke, the men negotiated with MTV, which wanted to film the trebuchet, to fund a larger net. On his 55th birthday, Kirke himself had a go, with local TV crews in attendance.

“My cousin Tony had the imprint of a net on his forehead. Someone twisted their foot. David Kirke pulled a muscle in his neck. Richard landed on his head and it went numb for half an hour on one side. I twisted my ankle. But it was all part and parcel of what was going on,” Aitkenhead says. “It was quite obviously dangerous and that’s all there was to it. There were no complaints.”

In 2001, Aitkenhead gave away the scrapyard, sold his house, and devoted himself to building an improved trebuchet at Middlemoor Water Park. The “Mark II” was ready six months later. “All the while, I was in touch with Ding Boston,” Aitkenhead says. “He said, ‘Look, if you do anything with this, let us know. We’ll come down and we’re happy to help, get involved. Or if you just want to throw us, great.’”

Boston—whose Stunt Factory has been banned from setting up at Oxford’s annual Fresher’s Fair, where clubs recruit newly arrived freshmen—offers a more passive account of his involvement. Stunt Factory members, he maintains, had already heard about the trebuchet and were intent on giving it a try. “I ask anybody what they would do in a situation like this. You can either say ‘No,’ which in my experience with intelligent 18-year-olds goes nowhere. Or, if you care for people who are obviously going to go anyway, you accompany them and hope the collective experience will help [keep them safe].” Nevertheless, a link on the Stunt Factory’s Web site, later removed, listed human catapulting as one of the club’s activities, showed pictures of the trebuchet in action, and promised, “That could be you. No, really.”

In any event, Stunt Factory members attended three separate events with the trebuchet. By the time Dino Yankov fell to his death, the machine had been fired successfully at least 40 times.

Since investigators are staying mum until the trial, what exactly went wrong remains a mystery. “Trebuchets were known to be extremely accurate. That’s why they were still used for 100 or so years after cannons came in,” says Colonel Wayne Neel, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Virginia Military Institute who was one of five experts called in to examine the trebuchet. “You could pretty much put a shot in a bushel basket at a couple of hundred yards.”

There are a limited number of easily changed variables determining the shot’s distance, says Neel: the length of the sling used; the angle of the peg on top of the trebuchet’s beam, off which the sling flies; the amount of counterweight on the beam. “The things that can go wrong did go wrong,” Neel says. “The things that can be adjusted, they just didn’t have them adjusted right.” He pauses. “But, of course, basically the thing that went wrong was doing it in the first place.”