By Emma Mason

Published: Tuesday, 08 February 2022 at 12:00 am

---

Here we chart the history of the so-called “Roarin’ Game”, which Scotland’s national bard, Robert Burns, wrote about in his poetry…

When was curling first invented?

The exact origins of curling remain a mystery, but it was the Scots who first embraced the sport and drew up the early official rules of the game.

Curling seems to have started out as a fun Scottish pastime of throwing stones over ice, played informally on frozen lochs and ponds in the medieval period. Today, every Olympic curling stone is made from granite hewn from a quarry on the island of Ailsa Craig off of Scotland’s Ayrshire Coast, and their size has been standardised. But the earliest curling stones were made from a variety of different stones and came in all shapes and sizes. “Players would choose the most useful variation to sneak through a gap on the ice or cover the target, all with the aim of strategising victory,” according to the Beijing 2022 website. The world’s oldest curling stone dates from 1511 ­and can be found today in the collection of the Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum.

The earliest surviving reference to curling, written in Latin, dates from 1541, “when notary John McQuin recorded a challenge that occurred in Paisley, Scotland, between John Sclater, a monk from the local abbey, and one Gavin Hamilton,” writes Jeff Wallenfeldt for Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Apparently Sclater took three practices throws with a stone on the ice, and then the contest was on.”

Paintings by a 16th-century Flemish artist, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c1525­­–69) seem to depict “an activity similar to curling being played on frozen ponds,” according to the Word Curling Federation. And poets across the ages from the Scottish regions of Kirkcudbrightshire, Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire have celebrated the game in published poems.

Curling even features in the poetry of Scotland’s national bard, Robert Burns. The opening lines of his 1785 poem ‘The Vision’ read:

The sun had clos’d the winter day,

The Curlers quat their roaring play…

Meanwhile, two stanzas of ‘Tam Samson’s Elegy’, written by Burns the following year, read:

When Winter muffles up his cloak,
And binds the mire like a rock;
When to the loughs the curlers flock,
Wi’ gleesome speed,
Wha will they station at the cock?
Tam Samson’s dead!

He was the king of a’ the Core.
To guard, or draw, or wick a bore,
Or up the rink like Jehu roar
In time o’ need;
But now he lags on Death’s hog-score,
Tam Samson’s dead!

There is even evidence that Burns himself took part in a ‘bonspiel’ (a curling tournament) in January 1789.

• Read more | Did Robert Burns really write ‘Auld Lang Syne’? Plus 6 other facts

 

The Grand Caledonian Curling Club

Records show that by the 18th century curling was being played throughout the Lowlands of Scotland. Different forms of the game existed – the most popular involved rinks of seven, eight, or nine curlers throwing only one stone. Curling clubs and societies sprang up across the country, and by the 1830s curling had become so popular and so widespread that there arose demand for the founding of a national club to regulate the game.

The Grand Caledonian Curling Club was born in 1838 and became the sport’s governing body. Set up with the purpose “of regulating the ancient Scottish game of Curling by general laws”, the club formally adopted the ‘four by two’ (meaning four people in a rink, each throwing two stones) form of the game as the standard, the official Scottish Curling website explains. “By the early 1860s this form had ousted all the others.”

Curling has been dubbed the “Roarin’ Game”, with the ‘roar’ referring to the noise of the granite stone as it travels over the ice.

---

Listen: Author Juliet Nicolson tells the story of the frozen winter of 1962. As Britain shivered under a blanket of ice and snow, new political and cultural forces were emerging that would shake up the nation