A climbing wall is an artificially constructed wall, sometimes made of brick or wood, but most often a multiplex board that has drilled holes in. The wall has grips for both your hands and feet and also may have attachments for belay ropes. Many people use climing walls to practice their lead climbing and bouldering techniques.

The first artificial wall was created in the UK in 1964 at Leeds University by Don Robinson the founder of DR Climbing Walls. He created this by inserting pieces of rock into a corridor wall. With Sheffield being England’s centre for climbing due to the fact it was close to the Peak District, it was there where the first commercial wall was built. Climbing walls has provided people with the opportunity to try rock climbing mainly in gyms is it becoming popular and not only is Gym climbing but also Bouldering gyms.

A “woody” in the climbing community is basically the simplest type of wall made from plywood, having a combination of bolt on holds and screw on holds. Bolt on holds are fixed to the wall with iron bolts and screw on holds are generally much smaller due to the nature of their fixing. There are other types of walls that can be used for climbing and these can include concrete sprayed onto a wired mesh, large trees, slabs of granite, manufactured steel and aluminium panels and textured fibreglass walls.

Holds come in different colours, generally the same colours on a wall represent all the same route, a climber is only allowed to put his hands and feet on holds that of the same colour. Routes are generally set at different levels to test the climber’s ability they are set at levels of difficulty by being colour coded. The people who set these are called route setters or course setters.