Despite going into the final as the only undefeated team in the tournament, Scotland's world champions had to settle for silver at the Le Gruyere European Curling Championships in Stavanger, Norway, when they lost yesterday's women's final by 5-10 to Sweden.

The women's defeat came as the Scottish men took bronze, beating their Danish hosts by 7-6.

Eve Muirhead's team of Anna Sloan, Vicki Adams and Claire Hamilton, had comfortably topped the round-robin before beating Switzerland easily in the play-off game to reach the final.

But they struggled from the first end when Muirhead had a complete miss with her attempted take-out to hand Sweden a steal of one point.

The Scots recovered in the second end, scoring one point of their own with a Muirhead nose-hit, but Sweden's fourth player Maria Prytz promoted one of her own stones and knocked out a Scottish counter to score three in the third end for a 4-1 lead.

It took all the way to the sixth end for the Scots to get back on terms when Prytz left one stone in the house, giving Scotland a single steal for 4-4. But the Scots could not capitalise as Sweden responded with two points in the seventh for a 6-4 lead. To make matters worse, the Scots started to run out of time on the match-clock. They were forced to rush in the last end and eventually Muirhead was left with an impossible shot, which she played with only 12 seconds left, giving Sweden a steal of three from the end, a 10-5 victory and their country's 19th women's European title.

Afterwards, a disappointed Muirhead admitted: "That was pretty sore. We just didn't seem to be as sharp as we had been for the rest of the week and we ended up running the clock down a bit. But give them their dues, they played well."

She added: "When we got our steal in the sixth end to bring it back level, I thought we had a good chance, but when you're running out of time you don't have as long as you need to make decisions with your last stones and it does make you rush the whole game.

"But we can't use that as an excuse, we just weren't good enough today and that's the bottom line."

Moments after coming off the ice, however, her thoughts were already turning elsewhere.

"This is not the big one this season, it's not the be-all and end-all. Our preparation is for the Sochi Winter Olympics. It would have been nice to come away with the gold medal, but we've had such a great week, the girls played great all week. I think we're in a really, really good place and I'm happy with the way things are going. We've got a silver medal - it's easy to forget that, we've got a lot of good things to take away from this week but we just couldn't finish it off today."

In the bronze medal game between the Scottish men and Denmark, the Danes opened with a score of two. However, the Scots took the lead in the fifth when Danish skip Rasmus Stjerne wrecked his last stone, leaving Scotland's David Murdoch with a simple draw to score three points for a 4-3 lead.

The game came down to the 10th end and when Stjerne was heavy with his final draw, leaving two Scottish counters in the house, the Scotland team - skip Murdoch, Greg Drummond Scott Andrews and Michael Goodfellow - then won without Murdoch having to play his last stone.

Like Muirhead, Murdoch had a bitter-sweet reflection of his performance this week and his Olympic plans, saying: "We know what the real goal is this season, and this week was all about ­working hard as a team, having some good performances and playing well and I think we've done that.

"We've not got a gold medal, but we've shown what we're capable of. It's all about keeping that good form now and training hard and keeping things going".

In the women's bronze medal game, Switzerland beat Denmark by 6-4.