The story
Welcome to one of Edinburgh’s most elegant secrets. As you stand here on the banks of the Water of Leith, the city’s busy streets feel a world away. Listen for a moment to the river rushing over the stones.
Surrounded by the deep greens of the valley, you are looking at a structure that seems entirely out of place, and yet, it is the very heart of Stockbridge’s history. Before you stands St Bernard’s Well. At first glance, you might think you’ve been transported to ancient Rome or the hills of Tivoli.
This is a classic Neoclassical folly, a circular temple supported by ten fluted Doric columns. It was designed in 1789 by the celebrated painter Alexander Nasmyth, a man often called the father of Scottish landscape painting. But this wasn't built just for decoration.
It was built to protect something the Georgians valued more than gold: a mineral spring. Legend says the spring was first discovered in the 12th century by St Bernard of Clairvaux, who supposedly lived in a nearby cave and found the waters healed his ailments. By the 1700s, Edinburgh’s elite were obsessed with "taking the waters."
In 1760, three schoolboys rediscovered the spring, and soon, word spread that this water could cure anything from bruised eyes and total blindness to agonizing gout and "the vapors." In 1788, the eccentric judge Lord Gardenstone purchased the land. He was a man who famously loved his pet pigs so much they slept in his bed, but he also believed passionately in the healing power of this spring.
He commissioned Nasmyth to build this temple as a pump room. If you look closely between the columns, you will see a statue of Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health. She holds a snake and a patera, a medicinal bowl, symbolizing the purity and power of the well below her feet.
Now, if you could taste the water today, you might be disappointed. It is famously sulphurous. Contemporary accounts described the smell as reminiscent of "rotten eggs" or "a newly washed gun barrel."
Despite the stench, crowds would walk down from the New Town every morning, paying a small fee to drink a glass of the pungent liquid, convinced it was the elixir of life. Inside, though we cannot see it today, the well is decorated with stunning mosaics and a ceiling of gold leaf. It is a masterpiece of Georgian vanity and Victorian restoration.
As you continue your walk along the river toward Stockbridge or up toward the Dean Village, take one last look at Hygieia. She remains a silent guardian over the river, a reminder of an age when Edinburgh’s citizens sought miracles in a stinking spring beneath a Roman temple.