The Old Man of Hoy - August 2008

On the last weekend of August, Mark and I each took time off either side of the normal weekend to do this trip, one which takes a fair amount of logistical planning. The Old Man is a sea-stack on Hoy, one of the Orkney islands just north of the Scottish mainland. I won't go into the whole history of it, one can easily google it and find a wealth of information, but two interesting points of trivia are that 1) as recently as the 1800s it had an arched base, with two legs, one of which collapsed and formed the land bridge by which it is now accessed, and 2) the stack is expected to collapse pretty much at any time, a rather sobering thought when you're actually on the thing.
It is also one of the most famous climbs in Britain, and one which every British climber aspires to climb at some point in their career. And as my friend Keith Scott remarked upon hearing we'd climbed it: "Well it's good you got to do it while it's still 140m high, not 140m long!"

It's quite an experience just getting there. We flew from Belfast to Inverness in a puddle-jumper.

We hired a car and drove up to Scrabster (the port of Thurso) on the north coast of Scotland. From here you can easily see across to Hoy, which is the closest of the Orkney islands to the mainland. The top of the Old Man can be seen sticking up behind the low headland on the left (west) side of the island.

There are no ferries direct to Hoy, however. We made a crossing that night to Stromness on the Orkey "mainland" (the biggest chain of islands in the middle of the achipelago, interconnected by causeway roads). On this crossing, you sail right past the Old Man, and get a very good view of it, although the standard route up it is on the landward facing (east) side.

Shortly after the Old Man, you can see St John's Head, the highest sea cliffs in Britain. There are routes up here too, and some real epic ascents have been made.

We camped that night in Stromness, next to the golf course. When I woke up the next morning, Mark was lying in his sleeping bag about 50m from the tent. I snore, apparently, and Mark is far too much of a gentleman to just kick me in the ribs. In my defence I did have a cold at the time.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather on this trip. As you can see from the photos above, the day before the climb was dry, enabling the rock on the stack to dry out, and this was the view of the entrance to Scapa Flow, the next morning (the day of the climb).

The good weather was a huge relief after all the planning that went into this trip; flights, car hire, ferries, campsites, checking timetables to match up the various journeys involved.
The next step was to take another (much smaller) ferry across to Hoy, a journey of only half an hour or so.

From the tiny port of Lyness on Hoy, it's a twenty minute drive over to Rackwick Bay, from where you walk up over a headland to get to the Old Man.

A descent of a very steep, long, vegetated slope, which was hard enough in the dry, but must be an absolute nightmare in the wet, brings you to the boulder field that forms a land bridge across to the Old Man. A short scramble across this and you're there. It's advisable to put a helmet on straight away, particularly if there are other climbers above you.

The route we took is the one most people do, and is the easiest route on the stack. It's the original east face route, and involves mostly easy climbing except the second (crux) pitch, which is E1 5b, and the last pitch is solid VS up a beautiful corner. Mark led these two pitches, I led the easy first pitch, and the two rather rambly ones in between the crux and the last pitch. I managed to forget the camera on the climb itself, and only realised at the top of the first pitch, which neither of us was inclined to downclimb. Btw a good site to look at for climbs on the Old Man is this one.
Well we had the full experience. We started climbing at 1pm. The rock is sandstone, and is actually not bad quality, but it is very sandy, which again is reason to be thankful that it was very dry. I would imagine it to turn into vertical mud when wet. The crux was way to hard for me in my decrepid state, but there are so many pieces of old tat all over the place that I made liberal use of. At the top of the crux the stance is quite tiny, and we had to cope with a group of five climbers who were busy with their descent. Then when I was leading the next pitch (I set off up it in a bit of a hurry to get out of the abseling climber's way) I came across one of these charming birds. That one sentence in the second paragraph there; "Nesting birds and chicks can eject an evil smelling stomach oil up to 2 m, which repels unwanted visitors" tells you everything you need to know. Mindful that this was really his territory, not mine, I climbed past him as fast as I could, but not fast enough! I got a good few gobs of the stuff on the side of my face, all over my helmet, and my side. Clothes stank for days after, in fact even now when I put on that beige fleece I still get a whiff of it. He must have used it all up on me, because when Mark came up the bird was just dry-heaving at him.

There were others higher up, but fortunately the nature of the route at those points is that you can pick a different way up if you choose to do so. The last pitch is a corker, a beautiful VS grade corner and we were on top by 5pm. It was very windy on the summit, and we didn't stay long to savour it, as we still had to get down! Three long abseils, the last one a full 60m from the top of the second pitch to the ground, and we were down by 6pm.

We were both pretty shattered, me much more so than Mark (as usual) and the walk back up the steep slope to the top of the headland was torturous, although I did get this rather nice photo.

We also got to see the Stromness ferry (the same one we had taken the night before) on its way past.

That night we camped in the grounds of the bothy at Rackwick Bay, and it rained so hard that neither of us slept a wink with the noise of the rain on the tent (the bothy itself was occupied). At least it wasn't my snoring that kept Mark awake that night! So we had a perfect weather window for the climb.

The next day was spent driving around the Orkney mainland, visiting various tourist sites. We were both dropping off to sleep the whole time, due to our exertions the previous day, as well as the night of no sleep. We took the late ferry back to Thurso, and camped there, returning to Inverness the next day for our flight back to Belfast.

This was a fantastic, once in a lifetime trip, and a dream come true for Mark, who has wanted to climb it ever since he first heard of it.