If you're looking to strike gold—silver or bronze, too—look to Ailsa Craig. This uninhabited isle 10 miles off the coast of southwest Scotland is the source of the super-dense granite used to make curling stones for the Winter Olympics. Jim English, co-owner of Kays Curling, took a few seconds to evaluate a boulder during a recent visit. He assessed it for big cracks and large specks on the surface, reports the AP. "It's not just a case of landing a boat and then looking for granite. There's a particular type of granite we're looking for," he said, "ones that have got really tight surface pattern."
The common green granite comprising the body of the stone is found on one end, and the blue hone granite that forms the running surface is on the other side of the "craggy ocean pyramid," as poet John Keats described the island more than a century before the first Winter Games. Kays, which has made all the curling stones for the Milan Cortina Winter Games, has a history with the Olympics dating back to that first winter edition—1924 in Chamonix, France. The curling competition at those games was long thought to have been an exhibition event but eventually was confirmed as official. The company has continued to make stones for the games since curling returned as a medal sport in Nagano 1998.
Founded in 1851 and also called Kays Scotland, the company holds the only license to harvest granite from Ailsa Craig, which is owned by Lord David Thomas Kennedy, 9th Marquess of Ailsa. The island, which measures 2 miles in circumference, is believed to have been formed from volcanic activity millions of years ago. The Scottish Geology Trust wrote that the island is composed "almost entirely of microgranite," whose "essentially unflawed nature" makes it ideal for curling stones. Key elements of the sport are cold and collisions—teams push stones on ice toward a scoring zone and use brooms to influence the path. So, granite that cracks easily is of no use.
As for how the process works, Kays can go years between harvests. The common green "falls off naturally, so we just pick from the site," operations manager Ricky English said. Those selections weigh between 6 and 10 tons. The blue hone requires dislodging from the cliff face. Engineers drill and insert a gas charge to break the rock along its natural cracks. Those boulders are under 2 tons, so higher quantities can mean fewer harvests. Boulders are lifted into containers and ferried back to Girvan Harbour. Galloway Granite slices the boulders and cuts round "cheeses" from them, and sends them back to Kays, which produces 1,800 to 2,000 stones per year.
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