I guess if there was a single iconic image of Orkney, it would be the Old Man of Hoy. Continually pummelled by the Atlantic, the towering sea stack is now much more slender than its former self (this picture shows what it looked like in 1817- you can see much better where the name came from). It was, of course, a must-visit when we were in Hoy, but after a run of four days of sunshine I was worried that our luck might not stretch to seeing the stack on a clear day. But this was summer 2018, and the heatwave worked to our advantage.
Setting off from the tiny village of Rackwick, it took us a good hour and a half to reach the stack, on a path packed with heather and bog asphodel (the best botanical discovery of the trip- such sulphurous yellow!). Having seen so may photos of it I thought I’d know what to expect – but I was completely blown away by the walk out to the headland and the vertiginous drop to the sea from which the Old Man rose. This being Orkney, there were also of course seabirds; fulmars wheeling around the stack, puffins waddling around tiny grassy slivers in the cliff-face, completely nonplussed about the precipitous drops. And bonxies, always bonxies.
What I hadn’t realised about the Old Man of Hoy was that all the old photos I’d seen ignored the arguably more spectacular surrounding cliffs, all the same deep red sandstone as the stack but also teeming with sea campion and sea thrift. It was the kind of landscape you could stare at for hours and still feel like you hadn’t taken it all in- but with the promise of lavish desserts if I braved the single track roads again (if you go to Hoy, you have to visit Emily’s Ice Cream Parlour, because drinking salted caramel milkshakes watching hen harriers floating over the heath outside is living), I eventually agreed to head back.
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