Old Man of Storr

The Old Man of Storr is a single pinnacle of dark basalt, about fifty metres tall, standing on a grassy slope below the cliffs of the Storr on the Trotternish peninsula of the Isle of Skye. Its Gaelic name, Bodach an Stòir, means the old man of the Storr, and from the road below it does look like a hunched, hooded figure keeping watch over the coast. Around it stand other spires, blades and broken towers of rock, an area known as the Sanctuary, and behind them the black cliffs rise to the summit of the Storr at 719 metres.

The whole scene is the product of one of the largest landslips in Britain. The Trotternish ridge is made of thick layers of basalt lava laid down around sixty million years ago on top of much weaker Jurassic sedimentary rocks. As the soft rocks beneath gave way, huge blocks of the lava plateau broke off and slid downhill, tilting as they went, and weathering has since whittled the stranded blocks into pinnacles. The Old Man is one such fragment, left standing on its own. The Storr is also the place where the mineral gyrolite was first described, one of several unusual minerals found in the cavities of Skye's lavas.

The pinnacle was first climbed in 1955, by Don Whillans with Geoff Sutton and Jim Barber. For most visitors the reward is the walk up and the view back: from the Sanctuary the pinnacles stand out against Loch Leathan and the sea beyond, and in low morning or evening light the rock turns from grey to black.

The landscape has drawn artists and filmmakers. In 2005 the environmental art group NVA staged a large installation among the pinnacles, and scenes of Ridley Scott's science-fiction film Prometheus (2012) were shot here. None of it changes the essential experience, which is of weather moving fast across a broken, tilted world of rock.

Getting there

The Old Man of Storr stands above the A855 on the Trotternish peninsula, about 7 miles (11 km) north of Portree, the main town of Skye. The nearest airport as the crow flies is Stornoway (SYY) on the Isle of Lewis, about 80 km away across the Minch, but there is no direct link from there; most visitors reach Skye by road over the Skye Bridge, via Inverness Airport (INV) on the mainland. The walk starts at a large car park beside the A855 north of Loch Leathan; the path of about 3.8 km there and back climbs through a former plantation to the Sanctuary. Stagecoach bus services from Portree pass the car park, though not frequently.