Text 1: Learning to curl, by Fiona Strachan

An original contemporary magazine article.

The first thing they teach you about curling is how to fall over safely. ‘Chin up, bottom down,’ says Morag, our coach, a retired PE teacher in a padded jacket who has been curling for forty years and who makes it look like walking. I fall over three times in the first ten minutes, once quite elegantly.

Curling, if you have only seen it during the Winter Olympics, looks like a slow-motion argument about housework. Four players take turns to slide heavy granite stones down a long sheet of ice towards a target, called the house, while their teammates sweep furiously in front of them. Up close, it is nothing like that. It is much harder.

The stone weighs nearly twenty kilos, and you deliver it by crouching in a rubber foothold, pushing off and gliding forward on one bent leg with the other stretched out behind you, like a fencer who has decided to lie down. You release the stone with a gentle twist of the handle, which makes it curl as it slows. My first stone travels about four metres and stops, apologetically, in the middle of nowhere.

Sweeping is worse. It warms the ice just enough to make the stone travel further and straighter, and it is astonishingly tiring. After two minutes of it my arms are burning and I am shouting ‘Hurry!’ and ‘Off!’ with real feeling, though I have no idea what either means.

We finish the session with a short game against four members of the club, whose combined age must be close to three hundred. They beat us eight to nothing. Afterwards, in the bar overlooking the rink, they buy us all a drink, as tradition demands, and tell stories of matches played outdoors on frozen lochs, in the days when winters were winters. I drive home aching in muscles I did not know I had, and already planning when I can go back.

Text 2: The grand match on Loch Dunnart, by Our Own Reporter

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper report, published in 1864, a reporter describes an outdoor curling match between two Scottish parishes on a frozen loch.

The long frost having at last rendered the ice upon Loch Dunnart sufficiently strong, the great annual match between the parishes of Kilbride and Strathairlie was played on Thursday, in the presence of a concourse of spectators which could not have numbered fewer than two thousand.

From an early hour the roads were thronged with carts, gigs and pedestrians, the curlers carrying their stones in bags upon their shoulders and their brooms beneath their arms. By ten o’clock twelve rinks had been marked out upon the ice, and the play began amid great enthusiasm. It was a striking sight. The minister and the blacksmith, the laird and his ploughman, stood side by side, and he who threw the truest stone was the best man that day, whatever his station.

The roar of the stones as they travelled over the ice could be heard far across the loch, and the shouts of the skips, urging their men to ‘Soop! Soop her up!’, added greatly to the din. Some excellent play was witnessed, and many a fine shot was greeted with cheering that echoed among the surrounding hills. A little before two o’clock some alarm was occasioned when the ice gave way near the shore and an elderly gentleman went through to the waist, but he was speedily drawn out, and, having been revived with a dram, insisted upon returning to his rink.

At the close of play Kilbride was found to be victorious by a majority of eleven shots. The players afterwards repaired to the inn, where they sat down to the customary dinner of beef and greens, and the evening was spent in the utmost harmony.

Both of these texts are about the sport of curling.

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• what the writers say about curling and the people who play it
• how the writers present curling to readers

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