Climbing at the Castle

[sawyl]

Largely recovered from Sunday's efforts, H & I schlepped ourselves off to Finsbury Park to check out the Castle Climbing Centre. We stuck to top-roping and climbed something like 19 routes, including a couple of ones that had only just been set. Form was generally OK, although there was quite a lot of noisy footwork, and we both completely failed to complete a really hard slab route that was graded as a 5 but felt much harder than the 6b's we'd done.

The Castle Climbing Centre building is a monument to Victorian engineering at its finest. According to the web site, the building is an old water pumping station.

One of the main walls as you go in. We didn't climb any of these!

One of a number of bouldering areas. We didn't do any bouldering either!

Finally, some of the route we actually climbed. They were all rather enjoyable, although I struggled to solve the first move on one of them and was only able to climb it by cheating. I'm sure I must have done something wrong because the first move can't possible the crux!

After having a lot of fun on the slabs, we moved to the feature wall to play with the weird surfaces. Despite most of the routes being graded in the sixes, we both flashed them with no trouble at all. (Clearly visible in the left of the photo is one of my trademark chain sennets. When we finished we were able to go back and tally up the routes we'd climbed by checking the trail of sennets I'd left behind us)

Back in Wimbledon by a reasonable time, we went out to the Hand & Racket for supper, where I had a black bean and jalapeño burger with a really delicious salad and the others went for more meaty variations on the same theme. We then caught up on a few old-school climbing vids, this time largely crazy Englishmen doing crazy things like climbing choss in North Devon, before knocking off.