While creating the map of sporting museums and collections, I was browsing around the website of the Royal Caledonian Curling Club when I stumbled upon a remarkable labour of love – a database of more than 2700 places in Scotland that have an association with the sport.
Fastidious members are progressively plotting the locations on a map which can be found at Historical Curling Places ( scroll down when the page opens). Knowing how long it took to plot the 56 sporting museums, I tip my hat to my curling counterparts. More sports should think about how they can exploit the internet to collate, preserve and share their heritage.
And curling has quite a heritage. According to the RCCC website, curling’s written history dates back to February 1541 when John McQuhin reported a challenge about throwing stones across ice between a monk and a relative of the abbot at Paisley Abbey.
RCCC was founded in 1838 as the Grand Caledonian Curling Club and secured royal patronage in 1842. In the context of the history of organised sport, the RCCC pre-dates the (English) Football Association – the world’s first football governing body – by a quarter of a century.
The Royal Caledonian Curling Club hopes to include a museum in the proposed Kinross National Curling Academy as mentioned here in the sport’s dedicated historical research blog.