Qualla: Old Man of Hoy

Old Man of Hoy: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Users Richard Harvey, Guinnog on en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Fifteen million people watched live on the BBC in July 1967 as three teams of climbers scaled a red sandstone pillar rising 137 metres from the Atlantic surf off the west coast of Hoy, in Orkney. The Old Man of Hoy had been first climbed only a year earlier, and The Great Climb -- broadcast over three nights -- turned a geological oddity into a national icon. What most viewers did not know is that the stack they were watching is geologically young, probably less than 250 years old, and that it is slowly being destroyed by the same forces that created it. The Old Man is living on borrowed time.

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Image: Users Richard Harvey, Guinnog on en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Old Man of Hoy: Born from a Headland

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Des Colhoun, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Orkneyinga Saga, written around 1230, makes no mention of the Old Man. A Blaeu map from 1600 shows a headland where the stack now stands, not a freestanding pillar. Sometime between the 17th and 18th centuries, sea erosion cut through the headland to isolate the column. A fur...

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Image: Des Colhoun | CC BY-SA 2.0

Old Man of Hoy: Climbers, Cameras, and Firsts

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. Chris Bonington, Tom Patey, and Rusty Baillie made the first ascent in 1966, and the 1967 BBC broadcast made them household names. Joe Brown, Ian McNaught-Davis, Pete Crew, and Dougal Haston climbed new routes during the televised event. In 1968, Christine Crawshaw became the fir...

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Image: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data | CC BY-SA 3.0

Old Man of Hoy: From Bonington at 80 to BASE Jumpers

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bob Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 2014, Chris Bonington returned to climb the Old Man again to mark his 80th birthday, raising funds for Motor Neuron Disease research after the death of his wife Wendy. The youngest female to reach the summit is Sophia Wood, who was ten years old when she completed the climb in...

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Image: Bob Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Old Man of Hoy: A Landmark on a Clock

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DJB, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Old Man can be seen from the Scrabster-to-Stromness ferry, and from certain angles it resembles a human figure standing at the cliff edge -- which is, in geological terms, exactly what it is doing. Erosion is constant. Storms strip material from the base. The basalt plinth th...

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Image: DJB | CC BY-SA 2.0