St Bernard's Well, Edinburgh

St Bernard’s Well is a temple associated with a spring, with a pump room beneath it. Alexander Nasmyth designed it after the ancient Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli near Rome, and John Wilson began building it in 1789. The figure you see today is Hygieia, carved by David Watson Stevenson after an earlier statue deteriorated so severely that the temple stood without one for about fifty years.

In the 1880s, William Nelson acquired the well and its grounds, arranged their restoration, and then gave the site to the people of the city. Mosaic lines the pump room, although public access ended in the 1940s. The city council now looks after the restored site, and it is a Category A listed building. Nasmyth also painted this well; that work hangs in the Georgian House.