List of sea stacks in Scotland

The 172m high Stac Lee off the coast of Boreray, St Kilda
The Old Man of Hoy, "the single most famous stack in the British Isles"[1]
Stac an Armin, at 196m the highest stack in the British Isles[2]
Great Stac of Handa

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”.[3] 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.[4]

  1. ^ Mellor 2020, p. 160.
  2. ^ Haswell-Smith 2004, p. 325.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference BBC was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Mellor 2020, pp. 11–12.