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The history of curling

Curling is about five hundred years old, and roughly half of what is confidently said about its origins is a date somebody misread. Here is the version with the evidence attached.

Last updated 2026-08-18

What is actually known#

Three pieces of evidence carry almost all the weight, and they are worth separating from the folklore that has grown around them.

The evidenceWhat it provesWhat it does not prove
The Stirling Stone, inscribed 1511, recovered from a drained pond at Dunblane and now in the Stirling Smith museum.People were playing a stone-sliding game on Scottish ice by 1511.That the game began in 1511. A stone carved with a date is the middle of a story, not the start of one.
The Paisley record of 1540: the notary John McQuhin writes down a challenge between the monk John Sclater and Gavin Hamilton to play on ice.The game was established enough by 1540 to be worth a formal challenge and a notarial entry.Anything about the rules, the equipment or how long it had been going.
Bruegel’s winter paintings, from the 1560s, showing something very like curling in the Low Countries.A related game existed on the continent at the same period.Which came first. This is why the Scottish-origin claim is usually phrased carefully by historians and rarely by anyone else.
The claim to be sceptical of

"Curling was invented in Scotland in 1511." Two of those three things are doing more work than the evidence supports. What can be said is that curling was played in Scotland by 1511, and that everything about the modern game — the rules, the clubs, the competitive structure and the stones — is Scottish.

The whole timeline#

Five hundred years, with the entries that changed the sport marked with a brighter node.

Why Scotland#

The Low Countries had ice and had a similar game, and did not end up with curling. Scotland did, and the reasons are unglamorous.

Shallow lochs that froze predictably#

Curling needs a large, flat, reliably frozen surface, and lowland Scotland is covered in shallow water that produced exactly that for several weeks a year. The sport was an outdoor one for its first three hundred years, and it grew where the outdoors cooperated.

The parish, and the bonspiel#

Curling organised itself around parishes rather than around individuals, and the parish match — the bonspiel — gave it a competitive structure long before it had a governing body. The Grand Match, parish against parish across a frozen loch with thousands of players, was a genuine national event. That habit of club-against-club is why the sport is still built on clubs rather than on academies, and it is why a club is still the unit that matters.

Somebody wrote it down#

In 1838 the Grand Caledonian Curling Club in Edinburgh adopted a standard set of rules. This is the single most consequential thing in the sport's history before the twentieth century, and it is why the Scottish version is the one that survived: a codified game can be exported and an uncodified one cannot. Five years later Queen Victoria made the club Royal, which did the game's respectability no harm at all.

How Canada took it over#

Scottish emigration carried curling to Canada, the United States, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand through the nineteenth century. Canada is where it stopped being an export and became a national sport.

The reasons are the same ones, scaled up: an enormous supply of reliable winter and a settlement pattern of small towns that each wanted something to do in it. A curling rink was cheap infrastructure with a long season, and by the early twentieth century a Canadian town of any size had one. The competitive structure that grew on top of it — the provincial playdowns feeding the national championship — is still the deepest in the world, which is why winning the Canadian championship has historically been harder than winning the world one.

The rule that changed the game#

Modern curling has one clean before-and-after, and it is not the Olympics.

Until the 1990s the dominant strategy was removal. A team ahead could take out every stone that appeared, and there was no way to make it stop; ends were ground down to nothing and games were decided by whoever blinked. It was effective, it was legitimate, and it was extremely dull to watch.

In 1989 a bonspiel in Moncton, New Brunswick, wanting a livelier format, tried a practice rule that Russ and Glenn Howard had been using: the first four stones of an end cannot be removed. Guards survive. Suddenly there is something in front of the house that has to be played around instead of through, and the whole tactical vocabulary of come-arounds, freezes and taps becomes worth having.

The World Curling Federation adopted a four-stone version for the 1993–94 season. Canada, characteristically, used a three-stone version domestically until 2002. In September 2017 the membership voted to extend it to five stones from 2018–19, on the same reasoning: more stones in play, more ends decided by something other than attrition.

The rule as it stands today, and the tick-shot rule that was added to close a loophole in it, are explained on the free guard zone.

The modern shape of the sport#

Three things happened in quick succession and between them they produced the sport as it now exists.

Since then the changes have been in the disciplines rather than the game: wheelchair curling into the Paralympics in 2006, mixed doubles into the Olympics in 2018, and a long, bad-tempered argument about brush technology in between. That last one is its own story.

Curling at the Olympics Where curling stones come from

Sources#