Шотландиядағы Хой ағасы

Sea stack in Orkney, Scotland

The Old Man of Hoy is a 449 feet (137 m) sea stack on Hoy, part of the Orkney archipelago off the north coast of Scotland. Formed from Old Red Sandstone, it is one of the tallest stacks in the United Kingdom. The Old Man is popular with climbers, and was first climbed in 1966. Created by the erosion of a cliff through hydraulic action some time after 1750, the stack is not more than a few hundred years old, but may soon collapse into the sea.

The Old Man stands close to Rackwick Bay on the west coast of Hoy, in Orkney, Scotland, and can be seen from the Scrabster to Stromness ferry. From certain angles it is said to resemble a human figure. Winds are faster than for nearly a third of the time, and gales occur on average for 29 days a year. Combined with the depth of the sea, which quickly falls to , high energy waves on the western side of Hoy lead to rapid erosion of the coast.

The Old Man of Hoy is a red sandstone stack, perched on a plinth of basalt rock, and one of the tallest sea stacks in the UK.

The Old Man is probably less than 250 years old and may be in danger of collapsing. The stack is not mentioned in the Orkneyinga saga, written 1230, and on the Blaeu map of 1600, a headland exists at the point where the Old Man is now. Sometime in the early nineteenth century, a storm washed away one of the legs leaving it much as it is today, although erosion continues. From 8–9 July 1967, an ascent featured in The Great Climb, a live BBC three night outside broadcast, which had around 15 million viewers. 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. In 1997, Catherine Destivelle made a solo ascent of the Old Man of Hoy; she did so while four months pregnant; her climb is captured in the 1998 climbing film, Rock Queen. This climb was filmed and has often been credited as the first solo ascent, but the Old Man had previously been soloed in October 1985 by Scots climber Bob Duncan; like Destivelle, he backroped the second, crux pitch, though he also backroped the top pitch because "it looked harder from below than it turned out to be". Red Széll became the first blind person to climb the Old Man, despite suffering from retinitis pigmentosa that left him with 5% vision. With assistance from Martin Moran and Nick Carter, he scaled the stack in 2013. In 2019, Jesse Dufton became the first blind climber to lead an ascent on Old Man of Hoy. The climb was the subject of the 2020 film Climbing Blind. The youngest female to climb the Old Man of Hoy is Sophia Wood, who was 10 years old when she completed the climb in just over 3 hours in June 2023. She traveled from the southeast of Virginia USA to Hoy Scotland UK and completed the climb with her two guides Edmund Hastings and Alex Riley. Sophia used this climb to start a fundraiser to help introduce climbing to kids with the "Boys and Girls Club" in her local area. There are seven routes up the stack, the most commonly used of which is the original landward facing East Face Route, graded E1 5b (Extremely Severe). A log book in a Tupperware container is buried in a cairn on the summit, as an ascensionists' record. As many as fifty ascents of the stack are made each year.

Roger Holmes, Gus Hutchison Brown, and Tim Emmett made the first BASE jump from the stack on 14 May 2008. Hutchinson Brown died 11 days later during a jump in Switzerland. On 27 July 2019, two Poles, Filip Kubica and Dominik Grajner repeated BASE jumped from the top.