Old Man of Hoy | |
|---|---|
 The Old Man of Hoy from the north | |
  Location within Orkney | |
| Coordinates:58°53′09″N3°25′59″W / 58.88570°N 3.43299°W /58.88570; -3.43299 | |
| Grid position | HY 17635 00779 |
| Location | Hoy,Orkney, Scotland |
| Geology | Old Red Sandstonesea stack |
| Elevation | 137 metres (449 feet) |
| First ascent | Chris Bonington, Rusty Baillie andTom Patey, 19 July 1966 |
TheOld Man of Hoy is a 449-foot (137-metre)sea stack onHoy, part of theOrkneyarchipelago off the north coast of Scotland. Formed fromOld Red Sandstone, it is one of the tallest stacks in the United Kingdom. The Old Man is popular with climbers, and was first climbed in 1966. Created by the erosion of a cliff throughhydraulic action some time after 1750, the stack is not more than a few hundred years old, but may soon collapse into the sea.
The Old Man stands close to Rackwick Bay on the west coast ofHoy, inOrkney, Scotland, and can be seen from theScrabster toStromness ferry.[1] From certain angles it is said to resemble a human figure.[2]
Winds are faster than 8 metres per second (18 mph) for nearly a third of the time, and gales occur on average for 29 days a year. Combined with the depth of the sea, which quickly falls to 60 metres (200 ft), high-energy waves on the western side of Hoy lead to rapiderosion of the coast.[3]
The Old Man of Hoy is a red sandstone stack, perched on aplinth ofbasalt rock, and one of the tallest sea stacks in the UK.[4][5] It is separated from the mainland by a 60-metre (200 ft) chasm strewn with debris, and has nearly vertical sides with a top just a few metres wide.[3] The rock is composed of layers of soft, sandy and pebblysandstone and harderflagstones ofOld Red Sandstone, giving the sides a notched and slab-like profile.[6][7]
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The Old Man is probably less than 250 years old and may be in danger of collapsing.[3][8] The stack is not mentioned in theOrkneyinga saga, writtenc.1230, and on theBlaeu map of 1600, aheadland exists at the point where the Old Man is now.[8] The McKenzie map of Hoy of 1750 similarly shows a headland but no stack, but by 1819 the Old Man had been separated from the mainland.[8]William Daniell sketched the sea stack at this time as a wider column with a smaller top section and an arch at the base, from which it derived its name.[8][9]
Sometime in the early nineteenth century, a storm washed away one of the legs leaving it much as it is today, although erosion continues.[8] By 1992, a 40-metre (130 ft) crack had appeared in the top of the south face, leaving a large overhanging section that will eventually collapse.[3][5][8]
The stack was first climbed by mountaineersChris Bonington, Rusty Baillie andTom Patey in 1966.[10][11] From 8–9 July 1967, an ascent featured inThe Great Climb, a liveBBC three-nightoutside broadcast, which had around 15 million viewers.[12] This featured three pairs of climbers: Bonington and Patey repeated their original route, whilst two new lines were climbed byJoe Brown andIan McNaught-Davis and by Pete Crew andDougal Haston.[13]
In 1968 Christine Crawshaw became the first woman to reach the summit of Hoy. In 1997,Catherine Destivelle made a solo ascent of the Old Man of Hoy; she did so while four months pregnant; her climb is captured in the 1998 climbing film,Rock Queen.[14] This climb was filmed and has often been credited as the first solo ascent, but the Old Man had previously been soloed in October 1985 by Scots climber Bob Duncan; like Destivelle, he backroped the second, crux pitch, though he alsobackroped the top pitch because "it looked harder from below than it turned out to be".[15]
Red Széll became the first blind person to climb the Old Man, despite suffering fromretinitis pigmentosa that left him with 5% vision. With assistance from Martin Moran and Nick Carter, he scaled the stack in 2013.[16][17][18]
The youngest person to climb the Old Man is Edward Mills, who was 8 years old when he completed the climb in 4 hours 55 minutes on 9 June 2018, to raise money for the charityClimbers Against Cancer as his mother had terminal breast cancer. He was accompanied by his trainers, Ben West and Cailean Harker.[19]
In 2019,Jesse Dufton became the first blind climber to lead an ascent on Old Man of Hoy.[20] The climb was the subject of the 2020 filmClimbing Blind.[21][22]
The youngest female to climb the Old Man of Hoy is Sophia Wood, who was 10 years old when she completed the climb in just over 3 hours in June 2023. She traveled from the southeast of Virginia USA to Hoy Scotland UK and completed the climb with her two guides Edmund Hastings and Alex Riley. Sophia used this climb to start a fundraiser to help introduce climbing to kids with the "Boys and Girls Club" in her local area.[23]
There are seven routes up the stack, the most commonly used of which is the original landward facingEast Face Route, gradedE1 5b (Extremely Severe).[24][25] A log book in aTupperware container is buried in acairn on the summit, as an ascensionists' record.[18][26] As many as fifty ascents of the stack are made each year.[26]
On 10 July 2017,Alexander Schulz completed ahighline walk to and from the summit, at 137 m (449 ft) above the sea on a line 180 m (200 yd) long.[27]
Roger Holmes, Gus Hutchison-Brown, andTim Emmett made the firstBASE jump from the stack on 14 May 2008.[28] Hutchinson-Brown died 11 days later during a jump in Switzerland.[29] On 27 July 2019, two Poles, Filip Kubica and Dominik Grajner repeated BASE jumped from the top.[30]
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Catherine Destivelle's solo ascent in 1998