A man has died after he ended up stuck upside down for several hours atop a 295-foot-tall industrial chimney in northwest England on Monday, officials said.

The man, who has not been identified, was reached by rescuers using a cherry-picker that was brought in from Scotland after an appeal to the public for assistance in the perilous operation at Dixon’s Chimney in Carlisle, according to the BBC.

It was unclear how or why the bare-chested man ended up in the frightening predicament on the structure, which is part of a former 19th-century cotton mill, about 2:20 a.m. Monday.

A Cumbria police spokesman said that while the man had responded to rescuers earlier, there had been no contact for “some hours” before a specialist team from Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service used the cherry-picker to reach him.

Emergency personnel earlier used a helicopter, but that effort was abandoned because of the dangers of a backdraft, officials said.

“This is a very complex and difficult process given the obvious dangers to the man and the extreme difficulty in gaining access to him in a way which will keep him and emergency services safe,” John McVay, an official with Cumbria Fire and Rescue, said shortly before the man was reached.

When built in 1836 as part of Shaddon Mill, Dixon’s Chimney was the eighth-tallest chimney in the world.