The original golf course at Trump Turnberryon the southwest coast of Scotland, it’s got a few years on it: 125 to be exact. But that’s nothing compared to the age of one of the course’s famous neighbors: the uninhabited volcanic plug that stands sentinel in the Firth of Clyde about 10 miles from Turnberry’s coastline.
The origins of that windswept granite dome, which rises more than 11 stories above the sea and is visible from almost every hole in Turnberry’s Aisla Stream, can be traced back 600 million years, to those lonely days when the continents were barren and the only signs of life came in the form of bacteria and eukaryotes.
Anyone who has played at Turnberry – or, for that matter, Royal Troon or Prestwick, some 25 miles up the coast – will be familiar with the island for the wonderful backdrop it provides. The same goes for golf watchers who have tuned in to any of the four Open Championships that have been held on the Aisla course since 1977, most recently in 2009 when Tom Watson almost took the Claret Jug at the age of 59.
Aisla Craig featured prominently in all of those broadcasts, as well Torrey Pines“hang-gliders or Pebble beachHarbor seals do when the PGA Tour visits those popular venues. The rock is a staple of the Turnberry experience: an eroded igneous pluton that not only inspires awe, but also happens to play an essential role every four years in the Winter Olympics.
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Ricky English is not much of a golfer. “I’ve tried it before, it’s hard enough,” he told me earlier this week in a Scottish accent thicker than a pint of Belhaven Black. “It’s one of those games where one hole you can play like Seve Ballesteros, and then the next hole is in the woods and you’ve lost the ball.”
In addition, English spends most of his days thinking about another sport: curling. If you’re just a casual Olympics watcher—perhaps you followed the action in Milan last week—you’re probably familiar with the pursuit, which has produced Olympic medals since the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan. Curling, in its most basic terms, involves a “putter” pushing an approximately 40-pound stone down a 150-foot-long sheet of ice, with the goal of stopping the stone as close to the center of a target (aka “house”) at the far end of the ice. Assisting in this process are two of the shooter’s teammates, who sidestep the stone as it slides down the ice, using “brooms” as needed to reduce ice friction.
English knows a thing or two about those stones because he oversees their production process as operations manager for Kays Scotland, which has been the exclusive Olympic curling stone manufacturer since 2006. “We’re serving the whole sport,” English said of his small but mighty plant about a 45-minute drive north of Turnberry. “There’s only about 50 workers here. We’re really busy.”
It will probably come as no surprise from where Kays gathers her materials for the stones: yes, Aisla Craig her good self.
The island’s Blue Hone granite is used on the edge of the stone, while its Common Green granite, which is resistant to heat transfer and chipping, makes up the body of the stone. It’s a formula Kays has spent the last 175 years or so perfecting, with granite found nowhere else on earth. The factory, which is open four days a week, produces about 12 stones a day or 48 a week at a sticker price of roughly $1,000 each (shipping not included). That may sound steep, but when you consider that most stones last about 30 years, the cost can also seem like a bargain.
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“We have to maintain our quality standards for every stone,” English said. “Whether we make a stone for the Olympics or we make a stone for a (curling) club in Alabama, it’s the same quality control, the exact same way of making it goes into it. There’s no difference.”
Kays ships stones all over the world, from the US to China, Japan and South Korea to Mongolia and New Zealand, and even to . . . Antarctica. “They’re using it as a kind of luxury experience,” English said. “It’s like minus-36 degrees, so I wasn’t sure with the temperature and the conditions how the stones would be, but they seemed to be fine.”
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While Aisla Craig granite is uniquely suited to curling stones, it has also found its way into Turnberry’s golf shop in the form of ball markers and other granite-based memorabilia. Kays also commissioned a St. Louis club maker. Andrews to build four golf clubs in which Kays incorporated Common Green granite into the bases. They sold quickly. “So, yeah,” English said of his team’s work, “there are little links to golf.”
English said he also sees some crossover between the skills required in both curling and golf, and, indeed, it’s not hard to see the parallels between sliding a rock down a slab of ice and rolling a ball onto a smooth green. “There are some curlers that we know who are actually good golfers,” he said. “They’ve got a kind of skill from curling, with touch and feel, and they’ve brought that into golf.”
But English has little time to work on his movement or stroke. He’s got emails to answer and orders to fill, especially in this busy window during which his gems are enjoying their quadrennial moment in the international spotlight. To capitalize on the publicity, Kay’s online store has been selling Olympic-themed giftware (coasters, drink cubes) made from Aisla Craig granite. Most of the orders so far have come from the US, and Englishmen suspect that’s at least in part due to a certain rap legend on NBC’s Milan coverage team.
