We’re a mixed use Centre – this means we house multiple different types of climbing.
There are four types of climbing that you can do at The Castle:
- Bouldering - climbing on shorter walls, without a rope above crash mats.
- Top Roping - climbing on longer walls, with a fixed rope. The rope runs from the belayer at the bottom of the route to an anchor system at the top and back down to the climber.
- Lead Climbing - climbing on longer walls, without a fixed rope. As the climber ascends the route, they clip the rope into safety equipment attached to the wall.
- Autobelay – this is an automatic device that takes up slack as the climber ascends the wall and controls the decent, eliminating the need for a belay partner.
If you would like to use our roped facilities, you will need to be able to put on a harness, tie in and belay someone safely. We offer Learn to Climb courses that teach you these skills.
Route Setting
There is always something new to try, we reset new area's every week by a team of in-house and guest setters. To minimise disruption we only set during off-peak times on weekdays, areas are typically re-open by 5pm.
Check the route setting rota here.
Bouldering
Our Centre has over 10 different bouldering areas, including three outdoor boulders housed in our organic garden! The rest of the bouldering is spread across our unique building, meaning you'll get to explore every nook and cranny.
To indicate the difficulty of each climb, we use the V-grading system with a few tweaks. The easiest graded blocs are 'VB' and then it goes V0, V1, V2, etc...
In addition to set problems in each area we also have 5 circuits that are set across all the bouldering areas:
- Kids: (yellow/purple swirls)
- Beginner: VB - V0 (white/red spots)
- Easy: V1-V2 (green)
- Intermediate: V3-V4 (grey)
- Hard: V5-V6 (orange)
Routes
We offer top-roping, autobelay and lead climbing – with over 400 routes in the centre and at least 100 changing each month.
All our routes are graded using the French grading system and are easily identifiable on each wall - these range from grade 4 up to 8a. Our tallest walls are 13m high and we recommend customers use a 30m rope for lead climbing.
