List of sea stacks in Scotland

This is a list of stacks in Scotland that are surrounded by the sea at high tide. The highest stacks in Scotland are Stac an Armin and Stac Lee in the St Kilda archipelago and the Old Man of Hoy, Orkney. Some provide well known and challenging rock climbing routes. There are 275 or more stacks in the country; their names are influenced by the Norse, Gaelic and English languages. In Shetland, where there are over 100 stacks, the names are often from Norn, a local variant of Norse. The sport of stack climbing did not take off until the mid-1960s with the exploits of Tom Patey and in July 1967 15 million people watched the climbing of the Old Man of Hoy live on BBC television. The idea was originally suggested by Patey who helped put together a team of six climbers who were filmed undertaking the ascent. This was described as connecting "an armchair audience with the elite of a sport subculture intent on conquering one of Britain's most spectacular geological treasures”. Following Patey's untimely death in 1970 development of the sport in Scotland largely ceased until the late 1980s and the arrival of Mick Fowler on the scene.

Definitions and etymology

Cleare (1974) defined stacks from a rock-climbing perspective using three criteria:

"A stack should be higher than it is wide in at least one of its planes. Within reason there is no minimum height, except that if it is high enough to be worth climbing, then it's a stack. A stack should have been formed by the action of the sea." Mellor (2020) offers similar conditions: "a stack is an isolated cone, pinnacle or tower of rock entirely surrounded by the sea at high tide." He goes on to suggest that the difference between a stack and an island is that if the top is significantly wider in diameter than the height then it is an island, and that a stack should be at least 6 metres (20 ft) high. From a geological perspective a stack is a landform consisting of a steep and often vertical column or columns of rock in the sea near a coast, formed by wave erosion. This definition excludes isolated steep-sided, rocky oceanic islets typically of volcanic origin, sometimes called "volcanic stacks". In the main listing below three different types of stack are identified:

Sea stacks Outlying stacks, many of which are of volcanic origin Wide stacks that fail Mellor's definition of height to summit diameter above but which either have "stack" in their name or are clearly a "tower of rock entirely surrounded by the sea". There are numerous small pinnacles around the Scottish coast, many of them in remote locations. Such features are often not well-documented and the main list is thus confined to the larger and better known examples.

The word 'stack' is derived from the Old Norse: stakk-r and is often rendered in the Norn of Shetland as stakk and in modern Gaelic as stac or the plural stacan. Several descriptive names are used in more than one location. Examples include:

Gaada Stack, meaning "hole stack" and used to describe stacks that incorporate natural arches; Moo Stack, of which there are at least four in Shetland; Brough, which is cognate with Old Norse: borg meaning "fortification" and broch; Castle, Scottish Gaelic: caisteal, is typically used for an isolated stack; Ern, Norn for "eagle". The name "stack" is however also sometimes appended to features other than sea stacks such as cliff-girt headlands and a number of such features are also listed below.

Distribution Of the 275 stacks in Scotland identified by Mellor (2020) circa 110 are located around the coasts of Shetland of which 80 are around the coast of the Mainland. Most of the rest are found off the coasts elsewhere in the Highlands and Islands. He also lists 70 stacks in England, 10 in Wales and 55 off the island of Ireland.

Climbing history

The first stack climbers in Scotland were the residents of the now uninhabited islands of Hirta and Mingulay who were dependent on the bounty provided by seabirds. The first record of the recreational ascent of a sea stack in Scotland is likely that of Richard Manliffe Barrington, who climbed Stac Biorach in 1883. Sixteen years later Norman Heathcote and his sister Evelyn climbed Stac Lee. He wrote that Stac Lee was "not a difficult climb" and that two other women had also reached the summit. Nonetheless, the main theme of the sport in the UK until the mid-1960s was "incidental stack climbing in pleasant and accessible locations". Yorkshireman Ian Clough ascended one of Macleod's Maidens on Skye in 1959 but the picture changed completely with the exploits of Tom Patey, (aka "Doctor Stack") whose day job was as a GP in Ullapool. He began with the Old Man of Stoer in 1966 and followed this up with ascents of Am Buachaille, the Old Man of Hoy and the Great Stac of Handa. After his death when descending The Maiden in 1970 "most Scottish stack explorations abruptly ceased". There was then a hiatus of a dozen years as climbers began "putting up harder and harder lines on comfortable stacks until they felt strong enough to venture north again". In 1982 Arnis Strapcans put up a new route on the Old Man of Hoy. Two more routes were created on this stack in 1984 and with the arrival on the UK scene of Mick Fowler in 1985 events moved apace. He climbed the Old Man of Stoer in 1988 and numerous others over the next few years, "his most outrageous adventure" being on The Needle, another stack off the west coast of Hoy. His regular partners on these exploits were Andy Nisbett, Craig Jones and Jon Lincoln who made up the "famous four" completing, for example, the first ascent of The Runk in Shetland in May 1992.

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