Hoy

The ferry from Stromness to Hoy takes forty minutes and when you step off at the Moaness pier the landscape has changed entirely. The flat, agricultural, sky-dominated Orkney Mainland is gone. In its place: green hills rising steeply from the shore, the moorland above them brown with heather and bog, the valley of Rackwick visible as a crease in the hills to the west. It is the same archipelago but a different world — one that looks Scandinavian in the way that Norway does, or the Faroe Islands, as though the land is trying to say something assertive rather than simply existing. I came off the ferry with a daypack and felt immediately, gratifyingly, smaller than I had on the mainland.

I walked the path to the Old Man of Hoy from Rackwick, which takes about an hour and a half each way. The route climbs through heather moorland with the smell of peat in the air and wind coming off the Atlantic almost constantly. The stack announces itself before you reach the cliff edge — you hear the birds first, the guillemots and kittiwakes nesting on the ledges, and then the red sandstone column rises into view, detached from the cliff face, 137 metres tall, its summit platform perhaps twenty metres across. The height does not fully register until you look down at the water. The stack was first climbed in 1966 by Chris Bonington, Tom Patey and Rusty Baillie — there is a plaque at Rackwick — and the ascent is still considered a serious mountaineering undertaking. Looking at it from the cliff top, the sea churning at its base, it is hard to imagine any other response to the thing than silence.

Rackwick valley itself is worth the time even without the sea stack. A number of the old croft houses have been restored as bothies and holiday lets, and the beach at the valley floor is made of rounded boulders in brown and grey that clatter against each other when the waves pull back. There is a particular sound to it — hollow, rhythmic — that I kept stopping to listen to. In summer, the valley holds a warmth that seems improbable given the surrounding exposure, green and sheltered, almost kind after the moorland above. Hoy has around four hundred permanent residents; you will see almost none of them on the walk to the stack. The day I went, low cloud was sitting on the upper hills, the Old Man emerging and disappearing from it as the mist moved, which turned the walk into something stranger and better than the clear-weather version would have been.

When to go: May through September for the cliff walk to the Old Man of Hoy. The path crosses open moorland and is exposed in poor weather — go in reasonable visibility and wind conditions. Birdwatchers should aim for late April through early July for nesting seabirds on the cliffs. Hoy makes a long day trip from Stromness on the passenger ferry, though staying overnight in Rackwick changes the experience into something altogether more serious.