Ailsa Craig
— — the granite loaf the sea forgot to lift.
Not only on a wall.
“A single dome of blue hornblende granite, rising 1,114 feet straight out of the Firth of Clyde. Sailors out of Girvan use it as a weather-mark. The gannets nest by the tens of thousands on the north face every summer, then leave the rock to the lighthouse and the wind. The stone itself goes out into the world quietly, cut into the curling stones that slide across every Olympic sheet. The island stays. The sea stays around it.
Ailsa Craig, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ailsa Craig is an uninhabited granite island in the outer Firth of Clyde, roughly ten miles west of Girvan on the South Ayrshire coast. It is the volcanic plug of an extinct Palaeogene volcano, rising to 1,114 feet at its summit. The island belongs to the Marquess of Ailsa's Cassillis & Culzean Estates and is leased as an RSPB seabird reserve. Day trips run from Girvan harbour in summer, weather permitting; there is no jetty, only a small landing on the east shore beneath the disused lighthouse.
The island's blue hornblende and Ailsite microgranites are quarried for one specific purpose: the curling stones used in international play. Kays of Scotland in Mauchline has held the harvesting rights since 1851 and supplies every stone used at the Winter Olympics. The granite is exceptionally dense and resists water absorption, which is why a Kays stone keeps its running edge for decades. Reserves harvested in 2013 are expected to meet world demand for years; no permanent quarrying happens on the rock today.
The northern cliffs hold one of the largest northern gannet colonies in the world, with counts above 30,000 pairs in recent RSPB surveys. The birds arrive in late January and leave by October; the rock is loudest in June. Black guillemots and a small puffin population also nest here since the brown rats were eradicated in a 1991 conservation programme. From the deck of the day boat the cliffs read white from a mile out — not snow, the birds.