The Old Man of Hoy is a 137-metre sea stack off Orkney, and one of the most storied climbs in Britain. In 1966, Chris Bonington made the first ascent of it with Tom Patey. Nearly five decades later — in 2014, at age 80 — he went back and climbed it again. That return is the spine of "Bonington Mountaineer", a full-length documentary that's a gift for anyone curious about the human side of mountain history.
The film works as both biography and travelogue. Bonington revisits his early days under the mentorship of Hamish McInnes, the mountaineer and rescue pioneer who pushed him to climb seriously, and recalls expeditions to Mont Blanc, Annapurna and Nuptse. A turning point came when his employer issued an ultimatum: the job or the mountains. He chose the mountains. That same summer, he and his companions abandoned an attempt on the Eiger to help two climbers in distress — and when one of the men died, Bonington was appalled by what he calls the "jackal quality" of the media coverage.
He returned to the Eiger anyway, making the first British ascent of the North Wall with Ian Clough. That fame let him turn climbing into a career, and the documentary traces the expeditions that followed: a massive team effort on the south face of Annapurna, overshadowed by Clough's death, and years of losses that Bonington says never got easier to bear. "If you're a climber, you have got to accept the fact that people die," he says plainly.
The Old Man of Hoy itself carries its own weight. After the accidental death of his son, friend Tom Patey suggested the stack as a way to refocus — and in 1967 the pair repeated their route live on British television, to an audience of more than seven million viewers, a staggering number for the era. In the film's present day, Bonington returns once more after another loss: the death of his wife Wendy, a constant presence throughout his career. Climbing with Leo Houlding, he wonders openly whether his body is still up to it, then starts up anyway — slow, pained, deliberate — and tops out just as he did half a century earlier.
Why does this matter to travellers? Because Orkney is more than a tick-box on a Scotland itinerary. The Old Man of Hoy is watchable from the mainland cliff tops of Hoy via a roughly hour-plus walk from the Rackwick area, and the islands deliver Neolithic sites, seabird colonies and wild coastal walking in equal measure. And for anyone planning a climbing or hillwalking trip, Bonington's story is a reminder of how much British mountain culture is rooted in these northern outposts — and how recent some of that history really is. Even if you never rope up, standing on the overlooking cliffs puts you within sight of a route that once held seven million viewers glued to a grainy television broadcast.