Then the ice pad is built up again. The iceman pumps glycol from the refrigeration plant through pipes hidden under the concrete floor, cooling its surface to -4.5°C. These pipes are the iceman’s secret accomplice, and will keep the ice pad frozen for the remainder of the season. Then the water is added. Although the official term is ‘flooding’, the iceman does not merely stick a hose in the pit and wait as water gushes in. This is a task which requires great patience and precision; the water must be added in increments and the level checked as each layer freezes.
‘When we flood,’ Steven informs me, ‘we are governed by the amount of water coming out of the mains. I have always planned to increase this but it’s more difficult than it seems. We have a flow rate of between 1 cubic metre and 1.75 cubic metres per hour,’ he continues, as if posing a primary school maths problem. ‘Let’s say we flood for one hour at a flow rate of 1 cubic metre per hour, we would put down 220 gallons of water. When frozen, these 220 gallons give 2 millimetres of ice.’
It’s not just number crunching. Ice management requires human judgement, just like the sport itself. The first layer of water, a light spray to provide the initial 2 millimetres, will be followed by around ten successive floods over five days. When the ice pad is almost complete, it will be painted with three coats of water-based ice paint. The markings are laid out: black wool stretched taut across the ice for the guidelines; the red and blue circles of the houses measured with pinpoint accuracy and painted on by hand. Then the whole rink is lightly sprayed again before flooding to level, about eight floods. The whole procedure takes around three weeks, and by the time the rink is finished the iceman will have walked a total of 50 miles.
Steven sends me a link to a website for curling ice professionals, run by an organization known simply as The Circle – the acronym for The Curling-Ice Research Centre for Leisure and Excellence. He’s on the committee, along with fellow ice-maker John Minnaar, and has helped to write the definition of curling ice which was adopted by the World Curling Federation. This website is home of the ultimate ice information, but there are caveats for those experts who grow too confident of their skill with this slippery substance. Minnaar writes: ‘Not everything in curling or curling ice can be explained, and history has left a burden of many misconceptions that science cannot yet answer.’ Indeed, he sees the site as a space to publish reports ‘that ask questions to which there are no real answers’. In one such report for The Circle simply entitled ‘Good Ice’, Minnaar captures the irresistible magic of the icemaker’s art:
That curler, who slides so gracefully towards the brush and releases his stone with that little push on the outturn that ensures his stone is already a foot off the line, is a valued customer and a competent curler, and there is definitely a funny line just there, but otherwise the ice is good. And that curler, who applies handle at the last moment on the inturn to fling his stone wide by at least two foot, knows very well that the ice is not good, because the stone never drew an inch. And that visiting team, well used to playing on frozen water needing strike weight to reach the hog, cannot ALL be wrong, the ice is simply too keen because all their stones are out the back . . . Good ice is true and consistent. It is silky smooth under the slider, but not slippery. It feels gentle under the stone with no roughness transmitted to the handle, yet it is so sensitive that the smallest flaw in delivery will affect the stone. The sweepers will know that the stone will glide rather than plough, and with their sweeping they can take it exactly as far as they want to and as straight as they need to for perfection. The skip will know he can trust the ice anywhere and call all the crazy shots, the freezes, the angled raises, the gentle splits and the triple tap-up killers.
The modern game is a version of the outdoor matches which have been played since the sixteenth century, since the monks of St Serf’s first spun a stone onto the loch. In Kinross, curling became a sport for farmers, merchants and masons – and especially suited farmers, who had time to play during the quieter winter days, leaving the farm in the charge of hired hands while they headed to the loch. Looking through some 1950s archive photographs, my attention is caught by a woman wearing a sensible plaid skirt – she could be an aunt of one of today’s champions. She’s using a broom to sweep the ice and a large wooden pepper pot as the house.
Today’s players are not immune to the romance of natural ice. I ask Steven what it is like playing on the loch. He admits that the ice is okay but the wind can be variable, and that affects the game – hard when you’re aiming into it, easy when you’re not. He tells me that the circles of the house aren’t painted on the ice in primary colours, as they are at the club – they’re just shovelled out, so you can barely see them. He laughs. Such a game isn’t really about hitting the house at all – just keeping warm, and drinking whisky. After all, one doesn’t take the score so seriously when a match can be discontinued at any moment by the umpire, if a sudden thaw strikes, a snowfall threatens, or darkness starts to fall.
The annual Grand Matches or ‘bonspiels’ arranged by the Royal Caledonian Curling Club between the North and South of Scotland – in which over 2,000 curlers take part – are still held outdoors, when there is enough ice. Loch Leven is one of the traditional locations. It takes at least two weeks of cold weather for the loch to freeze and, if the ice holds, a committee bores through the ice to check that it is the requisite 9 inches for safety. It rarely is. Grand Matches are usually held indoors these days, but everyone I speak to concurs they’re not quite the same.
Over the years there have been changes to the game, not least the developments in ice-making technology that allow players to improve their technique indoors, but the changes the Kinross curlers notice most are that the club membership is lower, the bar quieter, and the roster of matches more empty. Unlike golf, a Scottish sport that has become international and mainstream, curling remains niche. However, I’m struck by the warm camaraderie of this cold activity. There are handshakes before the game begins and conversations among teams in the bar afterwards. There’s even a note to this effect in the Royal Caledonian Curling Club rulebook: ‘The spirit of curling demands good sportsmanship, kindly feeling and honourable conduct.’ A true player, it says, would rather lose than win unfairly. The next day, I defer my trip to Edinburgh and return to the upstairs bar to watch another match, purely for pleasure. This time, the teams are less experienced, and seeing their uncertain steps on the ice, their wide shots, I realize how much skill lay behind the apparently effortless performances I saw yesterday.
I order a cheese toastie from the bar, which comes with a crisp salad on the side. Jim Steel, a member of the ice team, ambles over to check I’ve got everything I need and stops for a chat.
‘What makes Steven such a good iceman?’ I ask.
‘Experience,’ he says, adding, after a moment’s thought: ‘And curiosity. Because there are so many things that can change the ice: the outside air temperature, the humidity, the number of people on the rink. And whenever there’s a problem, Steven will always investigate until he has solved it. He will examine all the variables until he finds out what is the cause. And he’s not proud – he will pick up the phone and ask other people’s advice. He knows icemen all over the world.’
I have an image of an optician testing the eye, said to be the human body’s most complex organ. He looks beyond the firm white sclera containing the iris and pupil, to the structures that lie behind it, the rods and cones that process light and colour. He offers the patient innumerable options, twisting and turning different combinations of lens, until the solution for perfect vision becomes clear.
Before I leave Scotland, I visit a curling rink constructed long before the game moved indoors, and without the benefits of refrigeration technology. I take a train from Edinburgh to Glasgow and get off at a deserted station halfway between the two cities. The hawthorn hedges are bare of leaves, revealing the grey lichen on their branches; only the gorse is still in flower. I wait by the roadside for a bus.
> ‘You want ’Syth, pal?’ asks the driver. It must be a popular destination.
According to Wikipedia – and its own homepage – Kilsyth Curling Club vies with Kinross for the title of oldest in the world. It was founded in 1716. The pond that was created at the Colzium Estate for its players is probably (there are a lot of uncertainties in the history of curling) the world’s oldest man-made rink. The story of this area is one of building and transformation – from the ruins of the Antonine Wall that run from coast to coast a few miles away, once the northern frontier of the Roman Empire, to today’s new housing developments. The captivating names of the latter fail to disguise their insidious creep across the Lanarkshire greenbelts. The as-yet-uninhabited homes of Bonny Side Brae, their windows dark and empty against the immaculate pebbledash, tumble down the steep hillside like boulders left behind by a glacier.
The Colzium Estate, formerly a private residence, is now a public park, approached down an avenue lined with mature yew and beech trees. A sign at the edge of the woodland forbids the burial of pets. Another sign, complete with graffiti, indicates penalties for misuse of the children’s playground, which seems to be the main attraction this afternoon; it is being used entirely appropriately. Beyond the playground is a picnic area, and beyond that, a further sign indicates, I will find the pond.
The pond must always have been shallow, but now grass is growing up from its bed. So a lot of the pond is, in fact, not a pond. The eroded edges have been recently repaired with rocks held in place with wire. A duck island is moored in the middle, but since the grasses have grown right up to the island and the water level has sunk, this island is now joined to the ‘mainland’. Gulls wheel over the puddles, fighting for scraps. A figure in a pink tracksuit is speed-walking around the circumference. Beyond there’s a row of trees, and beyond that, a line of young saplings which haven’t yet appeared above their plastic wrap – and then the long view: the houses in one of the new developments built up against the old estate boundary. The saplings may have been planted so that one day the houses won’t be visible, or perhaps so their residents have some privacy from day-trippers like me. Later, reading more about the area, I realize the development was controversial: it’s built on land at risk from flooding. ‘Cavalry Park’ is also an unmarked burial ground for those killed at the Battle of Kilsyth in 1645, in which Royalist forces destroyed Scotland’s last Covenanter army.
The first curlers would not have been caught up in the action. But given the fate of the battlefield next door, I wonder for how much longer the historic but disused pond will remain? Kilsyth Curling Club moved to the indoor rink at Crossmyloof in Glasgow in the 1970s, and now its curlers play up the road at The Peak, Stirling’s purpose-built sports hall. I wander back to the bus stop along a millstream which runs around the hillside. From the path I can look down on the neat ice-tray housing estates, and the bowls club where a gardener is raking the day’s leaf fall from the neatly mown bowling green.
V
‘It may be gold: it may only glitter. I can’t tell,’ wrote the inventor Geoffrey Pyke. ‘I have been hammering at it too long and am blinded.’
Pyke was proposing that a giant iceberg should be used as an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. During World War II, the Allied forces needed a staging post for planes, which couldn’t fly long-distance without refuelling. Why not use a material that could be found on the ocean, which had the advantage of natural camouflage? Why not create a ‘bergship’?
This ‘Mammoth Unsinkable Vessel’ was approved by the top brass and given the codename Project Habakkuk – after the Hebrew prophet who had transcribed God’s words: ‘regard, and wonder marvellously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you.’
When did Pyke’s superiors stop believing in his bergship? Not, it would seem, after early investigations showed that icebergs would be unsuitable for holding aircraft (too little ice above water). Nor when it was established that ice floes would not work either (they were too thin). Nor even when it was suggested that an artificial iceberg was needed (this would take some work). Experiments on a lake in the Canadian Rockies resulted in a prototype weighing 1,000 tonnes and measuring 18 metres in length. This monolith was found to be too weak, but work on Project Habakkuk continued.
The bergship was not Pyke’s first engagement with ice. While working on Operation Plough, an Allied plan to attack a hydro-electric target in German-held Norway or Italy, he had investigated whether troops could be hidden within glaciers. At the time he’d made enquiries of Max Perutz, a biochemist and expert in crystallography who had studied the transformation of snow into ice in Swiss glaciers before the war. Now Pyke commissioned Perutz to investigate whether a new, durable form of ice could be created.
Perutz knew of research being done in America on making plastics stronger by reinforcing them with cellulose, and he believed this method could be applied to Pyke’s enquiry. In his fascinating memoir, Perutz describes how he was given a laboratory which met both his specifications and the stringent security requirements: ‘Combined Operations requisitioned a large meat store five floors underground beneath Smithfield Market, which lies within sight of St Paul’s Cathedral, and ordered some electrically heated suits, of the type issued to airmen, to keep us warm at less than 0°C temperatures.’ Concealed behind a screen of animal carcasses, with some young Commando officers as his technicians, he built a large wind tunnel in which he planned to mix water and wood pulp. The scheme was so secret that even Perutz was unaware of the material’s intended purpose. He sawed the pykrete (named after Pyke, of course) into blocks: ‘When we fired a rifle bullet into an upright block of pure ice . . . the block shattered; in pykrete the bullet made a little crater and was embedded without doing any damage.’ He found that ice made with 4 per cent wood pulp was as strong as concrete and had a relatively slow melt rate.
Of the many curious stories that have gathered around the enigmatic figure of Pyke and his inventions, the one I’d most like to believe was revealed by Lord Mountbatten in an after-dinner speech following the war. He had gone to deliver a block of pykrete to Chequers, the country house of the prime minister, but an aide warned Mountbatten that Churchill was in his bath. Realizing this would be the ideal setting to demonstrate the properties of pykrete, Mountbatten charged in. Churchill was, allegedly, delighted with the pykrete, which acquitted itself famously, floating without melting even in his warm tub. More easy to verify is Mountbatten’s mission across the Atlantic to the Quebec Conference which Churchill, Roosevelt and other leaders attended in 1943. He decided to demonstrate the resistance of pykrete to the delegates, as Perutz had done – by shooting at it. The bullet ricocheted off the block of ice and sped narrowly past an admiral before disappearing into a wall.
Despite the demonstrable strength of pykrete, the bergship was never completed. The costs of Project Habakkuk kept rising, and even before Perutz’s experiments were complete the flying range of aircraft had improved enough to close the mid-Atlantic gap. There were criticisms of the design: for example, the amount of wood pulp required would have reduced the supplies available for paper production, meaning a shortage of wartime books. But Pyke was not disheartened. He continued to concoct golden and glittering schemes, and grew interested in the possibilities of supercooled water – that is, water which is cooled to below freezing without turning into a solid. He claimed it could be used as a weapon of war: pumped from a ship it could instantly form bulwarks of ice or could even be sprayed directly onto enemy soldiers. Perutz treated such impractical ideas with disdain. Pyke’s behaviour grew increasingly erratic after the war, and he was to take his own life in 1948, leaving his name to a material that had yet to find its function.
New uses have been suggested for pykrete which look further afield than the Atlantic: the insulation of spaceships, and even sustainable architecture for colonies on Mars. Some proposals, like the Mars Ice Dome, draw on the design of igloos, but use pykr
ete-filled inflatable structures in place of snow blocks. There is abundant water just below the surface of Mars to fill such structures, and its cold climate provides the perfect conditions for ice. The fibre used to reinforce the material could be sourced from the planet itself or provided by recycling lander parachutes. NASA even suggests that the hydrogen in water would provide a shield against what its website describes as ‘galactic cosmic rays’. Pykrete would also have aesthetic benefits in space; as the principal investigator of the Langley Mars Ice Home, Kevin Kempton, told NASA: ‘All of the materials we’ve selected are translucent, so some outside daylight can pass through and make it feel like you’re in a home and not a cave.’
Back on Earth, pykrete has been used in the realization of a design for a bridge first sketched by Leonardo da Vinci in 1502. The artist had envisaged a stone structure spanning the Bosphorus, creating a route between Europe and Asia, high enough for ships to sail beneath. At the time, it would have been the longest bridge in the world, but the plans were rejected by Sultan Bayezid II and lost until 1952. In December 2015 a recreation was attempted in Finland by researchers from the Eindhoven University of Technology. The bridge collapsed the night before it was opened to the public.
With a few hours before catching my train at Edinburgh Waverley station, I head into the New Town to find a bar. Inside The Globe, one wall is entirely papered in a reproduction of an antique map of the world. From where I sit, I can see the North Atlantic Ocean and its bordering lands: Newfoundland and Greenland with ‘Disko I.’. This version of Greenland is a distorted version of the nation I know from modern maps, its uncertain margins marked by a dotted line.
The original ‘Chart of the Magnetic Curves of Equal Variation’ was issued as a plate in a popular Scottish atlas of the world. Charles Black of Edinburgh and his uncle, Adam, founded their publishing firm in 1807. As well as Walter Scott’s novels, they published atlases throughout the nineteenth century, the engravings in each edition altered to incorporate surveys from the latest expeditions. This chart marks the Northern Magnetic Pole at Boothia Felix (now the Boothia Peninsula), based on Sir James Clark Ross’s voyage to the region in 1831. Due to changes in the Earth’s core, the position of the magnetic pole changes over time. In 2005, it was estimated that the Northern Magnetic Pole was positioned to the west of Ellesmere Island in Canada.
The Library of Ice Page 16