The First Ascent of the Old Man of Hoy

In 1966, three climbers scaled Britain's tallest sea stack for the first time — a feat that became a national television event a year later, watched live by 15 million people.

The Old Man of Hoy is a 137-metre sea stack of Old Red Sandstone standing off the coast of Hoy in Orkney — one of the tallest stacks in the United Kingdom, and for most of its existence entirely unclimbed, separated from the cliffs by the erosion that formed it and battered constantly by the North Atlantic. In 1966, climbers Chris Bonington, Rusty Baillie, and Tom Patey made the first ascent, working out a route up the crumbling, unstable sandstone with equipment that offered little margin for error. The climb established the stack as a serious objective and drew the attention of the climbing world. The following year, the ascent became something much larger: from the 8th to the 9th of July 1967, the BBC broadcast a live three-night outside broadcast, The Great Climb, following three separate pairs of climbers tackling the stack by different routes — Bonington and Patey repeating their original line, while Joe Brown and Ian McNaught-Davis, and Pete Crew and Dougal Haston, opened new ones. An estimated 15 million people watched. Bonington returned to the stack decades later, at 80 years old, to repeat the climb in 2014 in memory of his wife Wendy, raising money for motor neurone disease research — closing, on the same rock, a story that had begun nearly fifty years before.