SPIDER-BOY!
Aged EIGHT, lad is youngest to climb Old Man of Hoy... and he did it for terminally ill mum
AN eight-year old boy has become the youngest person to climb one of Britain’s most extreme rock faces in an incredible display of courage and technique.
Edward Mills, who follows in the footsteps of mountaineering legend Sir Chris Bonington, scaled the 449ft vertical Old Man of Hoy in the Orkney Islands in just under four hours on Friday afternoon.
The record for the youngest person to climb the famous sea stack was previously held by ten-year-old Ollie Buckle, from Flax Bourton, near Bristol.
The climb is all the more poignant as Edward did it to raise money for the Climbers Against Cancer charity as his mother Bekki Christian, 38, is terminally ill with the disease.
Her condition had deteriorated so much in the past few months that her family, including husband Nathan, 45, and elder son George, ten, were not even sure if she would be alive to see his ascent when they began planning it earlier this year. But she rallied bravely and was able to witness her young son make history. He was fuelled by jelly babies and fig biscuits, as well as two bottles of Lucozade raspberry juice stuffed into a special ultra-marathon runner’s vest she had bought him. The youngster completed the ascent with his coaches Ben West and Cailean Harker. The climb began at 1pm, after a 90-minute trek across the island of Hoy to the bottom of the sea stack. With an hour’s wait part-way up to allow two other climbers in a separate party to go up, they continued with their ascent and reached the top at 4.45pm. After completing the climb and abseiling back to sea level, Edward, originally from Stroud, Gloucestershire, but now living in Dunnet, Caithness, said: ‘I feel very pleased with what I have achieved. It’s the hardest thing I’ve done. I couldn’t have done it without Ben and Cailean. The abseiling was fun, like a giant swing.’
Edward, who began climbing as a toddler, added: ‘My mum taught us to love the outdoors, so she will be with us wherever we go. When I climb I don’t think about anything else.’
The idea for the climb came about on holiday in 2014 when the family saw the Old Man for the first time.
After watching a video on YouTube of Sir Chris climbing it to mark his 80th birthday in 2014, they discussed how Edward might one day try.
A previous youngest record holder before Ollie was 11-year-old Leo Houlding, now a renowned British climber, who reached the top in 1990.
Last night, proud Miss Christian, who battled breast cancer only to see it return in 2016 and who has now been told it is incurable after it spread to her liver and bones, said: ‘For me, sitting on top of a hill with my boys and my husband, just us and the wilds around us, is my happy place.
‘That is where our big conversations happen. About death and life. What their lives will be like without me. How I want them to be happy and work hard. How they will always carry me around in their heads and their hearts even when I am not physically present.
‘It was an amazing experience to see him on top. I was so, so proud of him. And so happy that I was there to be able to experience it.
‘I won’t be here to see him graduate from university or get married but I got to see this. And I know that he is going to go far in life with the kind of attitude and hard work it takes to climb 450ft in the air when you are eight years old.’
She added: ‘I think I have managed to keep going through pure grit. I just don’t want to give in.’
Edward’s JustGiving page, called Edward vs The Old Man of Hoy, now has donations totalling more than £14,000.
His father said: ‘Best of all for all of us was the fact that Bekki was able to share the experience with us, by sailing past on the ferry and seeing Edward on the first pitch of the stack on the way out, and on the top on the way back.
‘That was what made the adventure for all of us.’
‘It’s the hardest thing I have ever done’