That the petitioner was born and brought up in the town of Biggar, in the Upper-Ward of the county of Lanark. The inhabitants of that part of the country, and particularly in the town of Biggar, are very fond of the diversion, which, in the Scottish language is called curling.[1]
John Valens, a tanner from Glasgow, believed he had been unfairly treated in a judgement given by Lord Armadale on 13 March 1804 requiring him to pay £2 sterling in expenses as well as other court fees. He petitioned the Lords of Council and Session to re-consider his case, but his plea was rejected on 24 May 1804, and Valens was again found liable for costs. But Valens was back with another petition on 1 June 1804 since Armadale’s ‘interlocutor proceeds upon a mistake’.
The petition of 1 June related how the case had previously been before the Glasgow Magistrates in January 1804. Valens claimed that his favourite curling stone, which he had lost three years before, had turned up in the house of William M’Corkle, an Edinburgh carrier, where ‘he saw the said stone with a card on it to be directed to a person in Edinburgh’.
Unlike today when the Ailsa Craig standardised curling stone used in the Olympic Games is instantly recognisable, earlier stones had a variety of shapes and sizes.
- For the history of curling generally, see ‘Scotland’s ain game of Curling’ from the National Records of Scotland
Before about 1770, stones, noted John Cairnie of Largs in his Essay on Curling of 1833, ‘were in their natural state as taken from the fields, or from the beds of rivers, many of them in use wanting handles, some of them having merely a hole made for the thumb, and a few only having the benefit of a polished bottom…stones were variously shaped, few of them so perfectly rounded as to be admissible on the rink of 1833, and some of them of a triangular form….At the present day, the shape of all curling-stones is, or rather must be, circular’.[2]
Ancient curling stones were often named. The Coupar Angus curling club, for example, possessed stones called ‘Surwaroff’, ‘Cog’, ‘Fluke’, ‘Black Meg’, and ‘The Saut Backet’ which give some idea to their characteristics. Dunblane had ‘The Provost’ and ‘The Baillie’ while Duns had ‘The Egg’. Hawick had ‘The Whaup’ from its handle shaped like a curlew’s beak and ‘The Town-Clerk’. Jedburgh’s curlers took to the ice with ‘The Girdle’ and ‘The Grey Hen’. Muthill had ‘The Bible’, ‘The Goose’, and ‘The Hen’. Strathallan Meath Moss’s ‘The Grey Mare’ took place of pride on the table at curling dinners.[3]
When he moved from Biggar to Glasgow, Valens brought ‘a curling-stone which he had used for many years while there….It was of the Duneaton-water species, and in every respect an uncommonly fine curling-stone, and also of an unusual size’. Biggar’s curlers sourced their stones from ‘the channel of Duneaton-water…being famous for stones of superior quality’. The stone was therefore almost certainly a ‘Crawfordjohn’ which the Curling History Blog says ‘is distinctive, and really cannot be confused with any other curling stone types of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’.[4] A modern Duneaton Quarry, established in 2009, extracts stone which ‘is grey in colour with rich quartz veins and can be high in iron’.[5] Even unnamed, Valens’ stone will have been distinctive enough to be recognised. Furthermore
When a curler has been for a few days, and much more for a number of years, accustomed to play where particular stones are constantly used by particular players, his attention is so eagerly and so repeatedly fixed upon these stones, that he knows them with equal, if not greater certainty, than he knows the person who use them, and can swear to the one with an much confidence, and with much correctness, as he can do the other.
Valens called on fellow members of the Glasgow’s Westergate Curling-Club as witnesses for his case. James Stark (mason in Glasgow), Charles Brown (smith in Glasgow), Daniel Ferguson (shoemaker and leather merchant in Glasgow), Allan Thomson (‘change-keeper in Glasgow’), James Brownlie (messenger in Glasgow), and William Begg (mason in Glasgow) all agreed that although it had been altered since they had last seen it, the stone was undoubtedly Valens’ well-known curling stone.
Rules and traditions for curling clubs had much in common with freemasonry. Members greeted one another with ‘the grip’, a special handshake, had initiation and other ceremonies, and used secret words or passwords such as lines of poetry or songs to identify fellow curlers.[6] Curling clubs were close-knit communities of players who knew each other – and their playing stones – well.
Valens’ opponents declared that the stone in question had been quarried only eighteen months before as one of three so that it could not possibly be the same as the one lost or stolen three years before.
In his Petition, Valens appealed to the Duddingston Curling Society (established in 1795) which had many members of the legal profession – advocates, Writers to the Signet, and Lords of Session among them – to act as experts to resolve his case:
…if it were competent, and appeared proper to your Lordships, to prevent further litigation, the petitioner would have no objection that the case should be remitted, and now judicially offers to refer it, to the opinion of the Duddingston Curling-Club, with is composed of gentleman, not only respectable for their rank and circumstances in that country, but who, from their knowledge of this art, are particularly qualified to form a judgement upon such a question.
Valens may have been invoking a tradition of ‘curling courts’ to resolve the issue. These, as Matthew L. McDowell points out in his recent article in the Scottish Historical Review, are somewhat mysterious: ‘What exactly a “curling court” was, and how common was their existence, may depend on which author one reads, and how the (contemporary) reader interprets the accounts’.[7] They seem to have been an excuse for convivial gatherings to confirm points, perform initiation ceremonies, enforce regulations, issue fines, and collect admission and annual fees. Notably, attendees met in a spirit of equality: ‘No sirs in this Court’ as the Kilmarnock Treatise on Curling put it.[8]
Valens was therefore attempting to have his case considered by his fellow curlers, gentlemen of Edinburgh but his equals on the ice, who could best understand his loss and provide recompense he desired by restoring his lost curling stone. At time of writing, the outcome of Valens’ Petition to the Court of Session is unknown.
[1] John Dickson, ‘The Petition of John Valens, Tanner in Glasgow’ (1 June 1804). Unless otherwise cited, the quotations that follow are from this petition.
[2] John Cairnie, quoted in John Gordon Grant, The Complete Curler being the History and Practice of the Game of Curling (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1914), pp. 23-24.
[3] John Ker, History of Curling: Scotland’s Ain Game and Fifty Years of the Royal Caledonian Curling Club (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890), pp. 42-47.
[4] Bob Cowan, ‘Crawfordjohns’, Curling History Blog (25 September 2013), https://curlinghistory.blogspot.com/2013/09/crawfordjohns.html, accessed 26 Jan. 2026.
[5] ‘Duneaton Quarry’, Hodge Plant Homepage, https://hodgeplant.com/quarry/location/, accessed 25 January 2026.
[6] Matthew I. McDowell, ‘A “brotherhood of the rink”? Curling, Freemasonry and the Royal Caledonian Curling Club, 1600-1939’, Scottish Historical Review, 104.3 (2025): 381-409, at 389.
[7] Ibid., p. 392.
[8] Quoted in McDowall, ‘“Brotherhood”’, p. 392.