On February 7th 1979 12,000 players and spectators took to the frozen Lake of Menteith for Scotland's only outdoor curling tournament, known as the Bonspiel or the Grand Match.
The Bonspiel - dates back to January 15 1847, when moving stones glided over the high pond at Penicuik House estate. Then, the club from Currie claimed the high score of 238 while the team from Bridge of Allan were named the losers of the day.
The sport, first played in Scotland almost 500 years ago, became the country’s most popular game during the 19th Century with more than 2,000 lochs and ponds in Scotland drawing people to the ice over the cold winters. Every year, the Royal Caledonian Curling Club draws up a contingency plan amid hope that the Grand Match can be played outdoors once again.
There were once around 2,000 outdoor curling ponds in Scotland
Drills are used to examine the condition of the pond ice to insure conditions are safe for play. In the past, six inches tended to suffice, although this has increased to seven in recent times.
In 2010, the Grand Match was poised to go ahead at Lake of Menteith with the ice meeting the needed regulation thickness
However, the event was cancelled due to objections of the emergency services and Stirling Council, with the association, having not executed a Grand Match for more than 30 years, unable to meet modern health and safety requirements in time. The RCCC as a result was unable to get insurance for the event although hundreds of players took to the ice in defiance of the police and ambulance service. Since then a committee has met every year to put in place the necessary plan for the fixture should the temperature sufficiently fall away.
Curling has been played in Scotland since at least1541 with the notary John McQuihin recording a challenge of throwing stones across the ice between a monk in Paisley Abbey and a relative of the Abbot. Scotland and the Low Countries have both laid claim to being the originators of the sport.
Some say that Scotland’s wealth of the key raw material required by the game - hard igneous rock - makes it more clear where the game was born.
However, the association said it was “emphatically” the case that curling was the Scottish game during the first two thirds of the 19th Century. Then, it was the most popular sport in the country when colder temperatures made the game part of life in Scotland for many.
Poets of Kirkcudbrightshire, Renfrewshire and Lanarkshire celebrated the game in published poems with Robert Burns referencing the game in his verse The Vision:
The sun had clos’d the winter day,
The Curlers quat their roaring play…
And n Tam Samson’s Elegy the poet displays great familiarity with the game.”
He was the king o’ 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.
With the second poem, and it’s knowledge of the game it is thought that Burns probably played the game himself.
In Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland (1781 – 1799), the sport is mentioned in several accounts of parish life. One, from the minister of Muirkirk in Ayrshire, said....
“Their chief amusement in winter is curling, or playing stones on smooth ice. “They eagerly vie with one another who shall come nearest the mark, and one part of the parish against another, one description of men against another, one trade or occupation against another, and often one whole parish against another, – earnestly contend for the palm, which is generally all the prize, except that perhaps the victors claim from the vanquished the dinner and bowl of toddy, which, to do them justice, both commonly take together with great cordiality, and generally without any grudge at the fortune of the day.”
The video I have posted is a short clip from 1979 but there is a great 15 minute video of the 1979 Grand Match from the National Library of Scotland here https://movingimage.nls.uk/film/3127
