Old Man of Hoy, E1 4b, 5b, 4b, 4c.
May 2008

When I was still living in Worcestershire I would head down the local climbing wall a couple of nights a week in Worcester and do a bit of climbing and a lot of yacking, you know how it is. Those big soft mats are designed to be sat on not fallen on. At some point last year I was chewing the cud with Sid about routes we would like to do. I mentioned the Old Man of Hoy and Sid jumped on the idea, did some research and set a date. That was that then - we would have a weekend mini break to Scotland and climb it!

8:30 Friday morning Sid, Andy, Tom and I left Worcester headed for the Orkney Islands, in particular the Island of Hoy. By 10:00am we were sat in stationary traffic on the M6! Thanks to the wonders of Sat Nav we found a burger bar somewhere in Staffordshire and then slowly wound our way North.
We arrived in the port of Scrabster at the far North of Scotland at about 9:00pm, just 20 miles away from John O Groats. In no time at all the perfect camp site was found behind a stone barn on a neatly ploughed field but with handy parking for the car! After a brief look at the ferry timetable we decided an early start would be in order to catch the 9:00am ferry. The next morning we were proud to claim our first place in the queue, only to establish that there wasn't a ferry until 12;00pm!
We arrived on Hoy at 3:30pm and having been given a shocking forecast for Sunday decided to route march across to the Old Man.

For those that haven't heard of it before the Old Man is the sea stack shown in the photos. It was first climbed by Chris Bonnington and chums and was the subject a year later of a BBC outside broadcast with an all star cast. It is graded E1 4b, 5b, 4b, 4c.
The route starts at the bottom of a broken pillar at the end of a walkway that links the stack to Hoy. This walkway was once an arch that collapsed 100 years ago to form a causeway. We started at about 5:00pm with a guidebook time of 6 hours. I teamed up with Tom who was on his 2nd ever multi pitch route!

As we flaked out the ropes I asked Tom "you know the climbing calls don't you", he replied that he did "well forget them, we will have safe and GO!". A certain sense of urgency was required with the threat of darkness looming.

The first pitch is straightforward but really dirty. I spent every move rubbing the sand off my hands before making the next one. It was also a little disconcerting to see a football sized chink of sandstone come whistling past from above and crash on the rocks below, there was no one above us. That said the belay ledge is massive and the views tremendous with seals swimming around the base of the stack and puffins swooping past.

The second pitch is the crux and involves a delicate traverse followed by an offwidth chimney through two overhangs. The holds were again all very dirty covered in sand and I was glad of the wooden wedges left in place by Bonningtons team! I collapsed on the belay and brought Tom up and then lead off again on the 3rd pitch which was a rather un-memorable wander up a vague line with little protection and little in the way of difficulty. Tom took over the lead on the 4th and final pitch which was superb, a steep crack with good holds and lots of gear and we topped out to a very windy summit.

It would have been nice to sit on the top and take in the view but the wind was tremendously strong by now, to the point that it was blowing the ropes horizontally as we set up the first abseil.
We decided to use 4 abs to avoid rope jams with the last one being particularly spectacular hanging free over the sea. We reached the ground at about 9:00pm.
Sid and Andy joined us a little while later, all of us ecstatic and knackered! We made our way back to Rackwick bay and slept in the car until it was light enough to find the bothy and sleep some more!

Here is a link to a short film that we made of the trip. If your browser does not support it then you can view a shorter version on You Tube here.