STEPPING STONES TO THE OLYMPICS
One thing you can’t miss from the Ayrshire coast is the blunt island in the Clyde –
Paddy’s Milestone, or more formally, Ailsa Craig.
The 240-acre uninhabited granite island is home to thousands of seabirds, seals, rare plants, plus the rocks which, as shiny polished spheres, will star on the ice of the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February 2022.
Curling is one of the 15 sports in the Winter Games and the competitors will be using stones that come from Ailsa Craig.
The Olympic curling stones are made in Mauchline by Kays Curling, a small company founded in 1851 when curling was particularly popular in the west of Scotland.
Ailsa Craig is home to two types of granite – Blue Hone and Common Green – which must be extracted before the craftsmen at Kays can create the stones.
The last granite harvest was in November 2020. “On this particular occasion we only took the Blue Hone, which is used for the part of the stone which touches the ice,” explains Mark Callan, a director of Kays.
It was a meticulously planned three-week operation, with two boats working out of Girvan. The weather didn’t help, but November was chosen to avoid bird breeding season.
“We commissioned an environmental impact assessment which ran to a significant number of pages that looked at all the elements that could affect our operation,” says Callan.
One of the key goals was to keep the island rat-free after it was cleared in 1991 to allow puffins to return. “We set up 50 traps round the working area. The boats were also carefully checked. And I’m pleased to report that there were no signs of rodent activity.”
Once the stones are complete, they are sent to the World Curling Federation’s base in Ayrshire. There, Rhona Martin, the federation’s equipment officer, tests them.
“Eight stones are thrown at the same time by a machine and then by humans so that before we send them out to events, we know they are well matched,” explains Martin, whose all-Scottish team won Great Britain’s first
Olympic gold medal in women’s curling in 2002.
“I’m very lucky to be working in a sport I love,” says Martin, who will be commentating on the Beijing curling for the BBC. Each day, as she drives to work, she sees Ailsa Craig. “It’s quite ironic because as a family we used to have a holiday house outside Girvan and as a child every time we drove down, I saw Ailsa Craig. Then to play – and now work – with stones from such an iconic part of my childhood is a full circle.”