Tankerness

There are a couple of sea stacks at Tankerness that don’t appear on the Orkney Seastacks website. Neither is particularly difficult and you can do them without getting your feet wet. However, they do provide a bit of adventure and some rope work practice if the weather is out of the west. Best to access them at low tide. Both stacks are about 15m tall. First known ascent was in 1984 by Hamish, Ken, Ian, Cam and Alan.

Stack O’Hangie

The Brough

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.

You need to head for Craig of Ness off the Tankerness Hall Road and the Covenanters Graves. The more southerly stack is the Brough, the northerly one is in Hangie Bay.

The Brough

The Brough is accessed by abseiling down the landward cliffs. We used a fence strainer as the abseil point. When you get close to the sea you need to pendulum over to the stack or at least one of the party does. Its quite a long pendulum so some care is required to avoid crashing into the cliff if you get it wrong. Also need to avoid the fulmars and the loose rock at the top.

The stack itself is easy/moderate in several places on the landward face with good rock except for the top two or three metres. Main hazards are again the fulmars.

You need to remember to take the abseil rope with you for the return Tyrolean traverse. You will need some sacrificial rope or old slings for the anchor on top of the stack.

Ian, Hamish, Ken and Cam setting up the tyrolean escape off The Brough. Ó Alan MacLeay

Hamish on the tyrolean off the stack. Ó Alan MacLeay

Ian on the tyrolean off the stack Ó Alan MacLeay

Stack o’Hangie

Stack o’Hangie is a little bit trickier to access and more reliant on good ropework. We stretched ropes from the head of the adjacent peninsula to the base of the cliff adjacent to the stack and then did a Tyrolean to the southwest corner of the stack. One of the biggest challenges here is getting enough pretension in the ropes to avoid getting wet.

Alan MacLeay on the Tyrolean with Hamish Ross already belayed on the stack. Ó Cam MacLeay

Biggest climbing challenge is getting off the rope on to the southwest corner. You then have to traverse the south face splash zone, which is greasy and more awkward than it first appears. The easiest route up the stack is up the south east arête at about VDiff. The rock is very friable at the top so considerable care is required and a helmet advisable.

There’s an interesting crack up the middle of the east face that looked like it might yield a good Scottish VS but that was left for another time.

Escape is by abseiling down the landward face and a pendulum back to land. If you are first down and get the pendulum wrong then you end up 3m off the stack and 3m off the land and heading for a swim.