Kettle Trophy Round 4 Results and League Table

 It's kind of "as you were" after this fourth round of the Kettle with the top three teams all winning and stretching away from the pack.

Brian Fleming had a good win in what was a tightish game against Karen Munro - still looking for her first points in the competition.  Brian, Stuart Ronald, substitute Blair Jeffrey and lead Angela Downie all played steadily and withstood some pressure situations.  He has played four and won four.

The other undefeated team in the competition, John Steven,  had an altogether easier game against Andrew Galloway's team, skipped in his absence by daughter Rowena.  Bragging rights stayed with dad, who won the game 10-1.

Shona Watt has only dropped one game so far in the competition and on Friday she had one of those "good game to win" struggles against Dave Munro's team.  Dave was away on Province duties in Stranraer but had arranged for Jamie Rankin to take his place.  Maggie Barry skipped the team and started well, but Shona, Fran Stretton, Jill Gillard and the quietly effective Louise Edwards - well, quiet in comparison to Mike for whom she was subbing! - ended up winning the game 6-5.

Finally, Jenny Barr, Katie Wood, Sarah Ford and Douglas Burns kept themselves in the hunt with a good "middle of the table" win against Niall Gunn's team.  Good to see Vicky Gumley on the ice subbing for Niall.

So - a good week's curling with many a substitute out on the ice and plenty of good curling on show.  Tables follow.

Points Competition

Well, I have obviously lost the old marketing touch!  After my wee piece on the history of points and the Currie Curling Club's role in codifying the various disciplines, only three people actually played in the event this year.  Given that two of them rejoiced in the surname Steven, is this the only time there has been a Points event where the name of at least one of the podium finishers was known in advance?

Rowena and John Steven had come down to the rink to compete and Jenny Barr, who was originally going to keep the score and generally organise the event, made up the three.

Instead of having four shots in each discipline, they decided to have two shots, but to go through the whole card.  John won the overall event with 25 points, which translates to 50 had all the shots been taken.  Given that typically you get your read / find your weight from the first stone that you throw, plus from watching the other competitors' ice and shots, that's a pretty good score in the circumstances.  Well done, John.

Rowena won the ladies competition with a creditable 20 points - ditto my comments above.

Now what can we say about the cue-using (on this occasion) Jenny?  Well, she was either runner-up in the main competition (if Rowena's score is not allowed because it counted towards her winning the ladies competition), runner-up in the ladies competition (on the grounds that John is a man - oops, stop right there, Robin, you can't say that kind of thing now), third in the main competition (see above), or last in the main competition (but that doesn't sound as good as third!).  Haven't got a clue, to be honest.  Tell you what; we'll leave it to the club secretary to make the decision and buy the prize.

Who - Jenny Barr, you say?  The same Jenny Barr that came either second or third, depending?

Confused.com.

The Mystery of the Stone and Robert Palmer

 About twenty years ago, a young man was walking along the banks of the Water of Leith when he spied a stone lying on the river bed.  He fished it out and took it home.  It sat in his garden until 2019 when he moved to a flat - crucially without a garden!  What to do with the stone?  Long story short, he contacted our own Jenny Barr, secretary of C&B, wondering if the club would be interested in looking after it.

The stone is old and has a lump out of it, as you can see in the picture above.  The handle (or what's left of it) is not centrally positioned and, though it is not clear in the picture, the date, we think, is 1827.

So who is RP?  Well, there was a famous Currie Curling Club member of the time called Robert Palmer.  Here is an interesting fellow!  Together with fellow club members Dr Somerville and David Cunningham, he codified the points game and set out the rules - still followed to this day.  

Lindsay Scotland recently attended a talk on Charles Lees' famous painting of the Grand Match on Linlithgow Loch in 1849 and tells me that Palmer is the only "commoner" (in this context, someone who is not an Earl, Viscount, Duke or Knight!) who is identified in the painting.  It can be viewed at the Scottish Portrait Gallery on Queen Street in Edinburgh.  Apparently Palmer, a mere dominie from a small village just outside Edinburgh, had been included amongst the great and the good of the time because of his prowess at the sport; basically everyone wanted to be on his team - the Bruce Mouat of his day!

To be honest, unless we can access a picture of Palmer AND the stone, we will never know.  The link between the two is the juxtaposition of where the stone was found in the Water of Leith, the date on the stone and the initials RP.

Currie Curling Club had a pond and curling hut in the hills above the village to the south and east of Harlaw Farm.  The ruins of the hut, together with the outline of both the original pond as well as the shallow pond can still clearly be seen, though all are now overgrown by trees in what is now a wood.

The hut, as you can see, sits forlorn and in ruins with trees growing within the original building.  There was space within the hut for club members to store their stones and take shelter if the weather turned inclement.  You can imagine the fun of a cold winter's day with the players all enjoying a dram or two from their hip flasks!  Maybe a fire was raised and who knows if a steak or two wasn't perhaps cooked to keep appetites at bay?  More perhaps on the hut and the ponds in a future post.

The question is begged though: why was the stone's final resting place the Water of Leith?  There is a clue perhaps on the same Lindsay Scotland's Map of Historical Curling Places, a site well worth visiting by the way.  On the site, there is an entry for the damhead at the Water of Leith and attached to the entry, there is a newspaper cutting highlighting that a match took place there in 1895.  Here is the cutting.

And now here is the map, showing the site.

Map reproduced with the permission of The National Library of Scotland  [ http://maps.nls.uk ]

Note the reference at the end of the article to a match in "the long winter of 1838".  Robert Palmer was the secretary of the Currie Curling Club in 1838, so it would not be a wild leap to imagine that he played on the damhead then just as his successors did in 1895.  Perhaps his stone fell through the ice.  Water would still be flowing underneath the ice.  If the same freeze were to happen today, I cannot imagine for a minute that people would take to the ice the way that they did almost two centuries ago.  Health and Safety was something for the future!  So, imagine that his stone fell through the ice.  When the ice melted, it was perhaps at the bottom of a deep pool and so lay undisturbed until 20 years or so ago when, just maybe, it was dislodged - in a flood, perhaps - to a position where a young man could first see it, then lift it from the water.  

Ridiculous?  Perhaps not.  True - who knows?  Good story though, even if the only certainty is that the young man found it in the Water of Leith 20 years ago!

My thanks to Lindsay Scotland of Carrington Curling Club whose Map of Historical Curling Places is a wonder to behold and to Jenny for giving me access to the stone.  And to Robert Palmer, of course, who seems to have been quite the fellow.

Points Competition Preview and a Wee Bit of History...

I wonder how many C&B members know of the club's proud tradition in regard to the famous old points game?  In fact, it was invented by three members of the Currie Curling Club, one of the two clubs that merged to form the Currie and Balerno Curling Club.  They were famous in their club's history and I dare say that their names will be remembered long after any of the current membership - why?  Well, they were true innovators in our great sport.

Robert Palmer was a teacher in Currie and we believe that we may have found one of his old stones from the 1830s.  More of that in a later post.  David Cunningham and Dr Somerville were the other two members who codified the rules of the points game that remain with us to this day.  It's really only in the various points competitions around the country that we revert to the old way of describing shots like "chap and lie" or "inwick"!

Somerville was also famous for inventing a shallow curling pond to enable the sport to take place outdoors after maybe only a day or two of freezing temperatures.  Actually, there was a heated debate that eventually ended up in the courts; was it Somerville, or the first President of the Grand Caledonian Curling Club, Dr John Cairnie of Curling Hall in Largs who invented the curling pond?  Cairnie got the nod.

This year's Points competition takes place this Friday at 18.00 (6.00pm).  There is an overall prize as well as a ladies prize on offer.  It's a fun couple of hours, so why not come along and see what our predecessors came up with.

Kettle Trophy Round 3.1 Results and League Table

As the competition moves towards its halfway point and four teams now find themselves having played three games out of their seven, Brian Fleming's strong team with Raymond Preston at third, former skip Andrew Cargill (who shares the position with Stuart Ronald) at second and Angela Downie at lead are on six points after a good win against Shona Watt's hitherto unbeaten team.  This was a big game for both teams so Brian's 4 taken in the second end must have gone some way to calm the nerves.  As is often the case in this league, the rest of the game was pretty even.

Meanwhile in the other game, Jenny Barr got her show on the road against Rowena Steven who found herself skipping again in Andrew Galloway's absence.  Rowena's four ends may come in useful later on, right enough and the stolen one in the seventh and last end will bring them back happy for their next game.

Results and League tables follow.  

It's all looking a bit ominous at the foot of the table, but John and Brian are looking pretty at the top.  Actually, I'll maybe rephrase that last sentence - they've been called many things but never pretty.  Never in a million years.  Just saying!

Jackson Trophy Winners 2021!

 Many congratulations to C&B President Niall Gunn, John Steven and Joe and Maggie Barry who have won the prestigious "Champion of Champions" Jackson Trophy.  Great achievement for them and for the club.

Kettle Trophy Round 2 Results and League Table

 Well, round two has been and went, as football commentators are wont to remark, and already there are patterns developing; good news for some but less so for others - including your scribe's team, which has been at the wrong end of two defeats!

It was a tight game in the first three ends between Karen Munro and club president Niall Gunn and his strong team of Joe Barry (3rd), Morna Aitken and Susan MacFarlane, but they pulled ahead with a big steal of 3 in the fourth end.  Karen was presented with big shots every time that she came to play and was inches away on a couple of occasions from a spectacular result.

On the next sheet, Shona Watt, Fran Stretton, Mike Wood and Jill Gillard were 6-2 up on Rowena Steven, who was skipping Andrew's team in his absence.  A spirited fightback towards the end of the game saw her win three important ends.

John Steven, Jennifer Marshall, Morag Wellman and Richie Anderson have made a great early statement of intent in October's games.  Poor Dave Munro was on the receiving end of a bit of a doing, eventually losing out 11-2.

The last game of the evening was that between Raymond Preston, skipping the team in the absence of Brian, and secretary Jenny Barr.  A tight game this one; Raymond got off to a good start, winning the first three ends, before he and Jenny swapped the next two.  A 2 at the last end resulted in a final score of 4-3 for Raymond.

League table and score grid follows.

Kettle Trophy Round 1 Results and League Table

Well, we are back curling! All eight teams were out for the first round of the Kettle Trophy 2021. John Steven took a six in the first end of his game when Karen Munro's stone overcurled and skinnied her shot right out of the house. Tough to take and the rest of their game was close! There was even a blank end thrown in for good measure with John eventually winning 8-2. Andrew Galloway and Brian Fleming had a really tight game with Andrew in the ascendancy all the way to the last end when Brian scored a three to sneak the game 6-5. He and his team go to the top of the table. The tightest result of the night was the draw between President Niall Gunn and Treasurer David Munro. Niall was 6-2 ahead going into end six of seven, but a big 3 followed by a stolen 1 secured the draw for team D Munro. Finally, in the Shona Watt v Jenny Barr game, Jenny was 7-4 ahead going into the seventh end, but managed to lose the second four of the night! I was driving home with her (thanks for the lift, Jenny!) and - well, let's just say she could have been happier! Looks like I will have to print off the league table and results, photograph them and then post the photos as Blogspot has removed the facility where I could just copy an Excel spreadsheet into the articles. Thanks Blogspot. Thanks for absolutely nothing!

New Season Is Upon Us!

Well now! Hopefully we will all play a few more games in season 2021-22 than we did in 2020-21! Covid is still out there of course, so it behoves us all still to be careful, but the vaccine seems to be doing its job in making everything safer so that now we can mix and match and even curl to our hearts' content! 

The committee has been been beavering away and you should already have details of your various teams, reserve lists, contact phone numbers and the like. President Niall has sent round his missive; diaries should by now be updated and all that remains for us to do is to pitch up for our first games! 20.15 on Friday 1 October will see everyone out on the ice. Team John Steven plays team Karen Munro; team Dave Munro plays team Niall Gunn; team Andrew Galloway plays team Brian Fleming and finally, team Shona Watt plays team Jenny Barr. Promises to be a great night's curling with old rivalries and friendships being renewed and new stories to be enacted and then told. 

There has been one very small change to the original card - did you all get it? The games originally scheduled for 18.00 on Friday 19th November will now take place at 17.30. Teams Dave Munro, Niall Gunn, Shona Watt and Jenny Barr are the only teams affected. What does this mean? Well, if you are a member of one of those four teams, check your diary and make sure that you have changed the time. If you are NOT a member of those teams, you need do nothing, zero, the square root of diddly squat.

Roll on Friday 1st October which, according to my calendar, is today!