The
Old Man of Hoy is a 449 feet (137
m) sea stack of red sandstone
perched on a plinth of Igneous
Basalt rock, close to Rackwick
Bay on the west coast of the island
of Hoy, in the Orkney Islands,
Scotland. It is a distinctive
landmark seen from the Thurso
to Stromness ferry, MV Hamnavoe,
and is a famous rock climb. It
is close to another famous site,
The Dwarfie Stane.
The Old Man of Hoy, seen from the
southThe Old Man is probably fewer
than 400 years old and may not get
much older, as there are indications
that it may soon collapse. 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. 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 Old Man appears
in the "Trailer sketch"
of the Monty Python's Flying Circus
episode "Archaeology Today"
in which the voiceover Eric Idle states
that singer Lulu climbs the Old Man.
It also appears in the opening scene
of the video to the Eurythmics' 1984
hit song "Here Comes the Rain
Again".
Climbing records
The Old Man of HoyThe stack was first
climbed in 1966 by Chris Bonington,
Rusty Baillie and Tom Patey over a
period of three days, 13 years after
Mount Everest was tackled. On 8-9
July 1967 an ascent was featured in
a live BBC outside broadcasting, which
had around 15 million viewers over
the three-night period of the broadcast
. 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.
On 8 September 2006
the stack was climbed by Sir Ranulph
Fiennes (aged 62) in preparation for
his proposed climb of the Eiger in
the following year. He was accompanied
by Sandy Ogilvie and Stephen Venables.
The stack now has a
number of climbing routes, but the
vast majority of ascents, of which
there are 20 - 50 in an average year,
are by the original and easiest route
at the British grade of E1 - one route
being an E6. A small RAF log book
in a Tupperware container is buried
in a cairn on the summit and serves
as an ascensionists' record.
Evidence from the original
1960s ascents is still present on
the stack, in the form of a collection
of wooden wedges hammered into the
vertical corner crack of the second
pitch. The belays consist of natural
threads and wedged ironmongery, including
(in 1994) a snow 'deadman' anchor
forced into a crack. Some parties
chose to divide the second pitch into
two, bringing the second around to
the base of the overhanging crack
to belay from a hanging stance to
keep the remainder of the pitch 'straight'.
Care must be taken on the descent
abseil at this point as it is relatively
easy to jam the ropes on retrieval,
and a stash of abandoned ropes cut
from the stack bears testimony to
this fact.
BASE jump
On the morning of 16 May 2008 it was
announced on BBC Radio Orkney that
the first BASE jump was performed
off of the top by Roger Holmes, Gus
Hutchinson-Brown and Tim Emmett. The
jump took over three years of planning.
A youtube video of the jump can be
watched here.
One of the people who
did the jump, Gus Hutchinson-Brown,
died a month later during an unrelated
jump in Switzerland. [2]
