St Bernard's Well: The Grecian Mineral Temple in the Woodland

Why is it significant?

Follow the shaded riverside path around a bend in the water until you are greeted by an astonishing sight: a glowing classical Greek rotunda rising directly from the wooded riverbank.

Key Facts

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Follow the shaded riverside path around a bend in the water until you are greeted by an astonishing sight: a glowing classical Greek rotunda rising directly from the wooded riverbank. This is Saint Bernard's Well, designed in seventeen eighty-nine by celebrated Scottish landscape painter Alexander Nasmyth, modeled directly upon the ancient Temple of Vesta at Tivoli near Rome, with ten Doric columns enclosing an open marble rotunda.

In the center stands a statue of Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health, holding a coiled serpent and a golden drinking chalice. In seventeen sixty, local schoolboys fishing in the river discovered a bubbling sulfurous mineral spring here, whose foul-smelling waters were believed to cure everything from arthritis and stomach ulcers to blindness.

Wealthy Georgian aristocrats flocked here by carriage from across Britain to take the waters, paying a penny to drink the pungent subterranean elixir. Inside the locked crypt beneath the marble floor, an ornate pump room with radiant Italian mosaic tiles still preserves the original stone spring basin.

Continue past the temple toward Stockbridge, where graceful Georgian footbridges lead upward toward the New Town.