The Old Man of Hoy is a 449 feet (137 m) sea stack on the island of Hoy. It is a distinctive landmark from the Thurso to Stromness ferry and was first climbed in 1966.
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The Old Man of Hoy is an red sandstone stack, perched on a plinth of basalt rock at grid reference HY175007. It stands close to Rackwick Bay on the west coast of the island of Hoy, in the Orkney Islands, Scotland and is a distinctive landmark seen from the Thurso to Stromness ferry. Nearby is The Dwarfie Stane.
The Old Man is probably less than 400 years old and may not get much older, as there are indications that it may soon collapse.[1] On maps drawn between 1600 and 1750, the area appears as a headland with no sea stack. William Daniell, a landscape painter, sketched the sea stack in 1817 as a wider column with a smaller top section and an arch at the base, from which it derived its name.[2] A print of this drawing is still available in local museums. Sometime in the early 19th century, a storm washed away one of the legs leaving it much as it is today, although erosion continues.
The stack was first climbed by Chris Bonington, Rusty Baillie and Tom Patey over a period of three days in 1966.[3] On 8–9 July 1967, an ascent featured in The Great Climb, a live BBC three-night outside broadcast, which had around 15 million viewers.[4] This featured three pairs of climbers: Bonington and Patey repeated their original route, whilst two new lines were climbed, by Joe Brown and Ian McNaught-Davis, and by Pete Crew and Dougal Haston.
A number of routes have been climbed, the hardest at the British grade of E6,[5]. In an average year, the stack is climbed 20–50 times, mostly by the original and easiest route at E1 (5b). A small RAF log book in a Tupperware container is buried in a cairn on the summit, as an ascensionists' record. Most climbers abseil on the descent, although care is required to avoid jamming the ropes on retrieval - a stash of abandoned ropes bears testimony to this.
Roger Holmes, Gus Hutchinson-Brown and Tim Emmett made the first BASE jump from the stack on 14 May 2008.[6] The trio planned the jump for over three years, took seven hours to climb the stack, and just 10 seconds to get back down again.[7] Hutchinson-Brown died 11 days later during a jump in Switzerland.[8]
The Old Man appears in the "Trailer sketch" of the Monty Python's Flying Circus episode "Archaeology Today" in which the voiceover (Eric Idle) says that singer Lulu climbs the Old Man. It also appears in the opening scene of the video of the Eurythmics' 1984 hit song "Here Comes the Rain Again".
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