“It takes 60m years and about six hours to make a curling stone,” shouts Ricky English above the whine of the lathes. The operations manager at Kays Scotland is surrounded by wheels of ancient granite in varying states of refinement.
It is a small business with a big responsibility: the only factory in the world to supply the Winter Olympics with curling stones. Competitors don’t travel with their own stones, which weigh about 18kg each, and with 16 required for a game. Instead, this year, 132 stones were crafted in the East Ayrshire town of Mauchline and shipped to northern Italy.
