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.
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