St Bernard's Well is one of the gentler entries in this batch, its legend carrying no ghost, curse or crime, only the quiet, devotional shape typical of a holy well tradition. The spring itself sits in a particularly picturesque stretch of the Water of Leith between Stockbridge and Dean Village, and the elegant little domed temple built over it in 1789 — designed by the painter Alexander Nasmyth in deliberate imitation of the ancient Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, and centred on a statue of Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health, by sculptor David Watson Stevenson — remains one of the most architecturally distinctive small structures in the city.
The well's documented modern history is straightforward enough: local schoolboys out fishing rediscovered the mineral spring around 1760, and its supposed health-giving properties were enough to prompt the elaborate pump room built three decades later. Older local legend, though, pushes the well's origin back nearly six centuries earlier, attributing its first discovery to St Bernard of Clairvaux, the great twelfth-century French abbot and founder of the Cistercian order, said in this telling to have been living unwell in a cave near the spot. According to the legend, he was led to the spring by birds, and after drinking its water for some days found his health restored — the kind of foundational holy-well story told across Britain about dozens of springs, here attached specifically to one of the more famous monastic reformers of the medieval church, though no evidence beyond the legend itself ties Bernard to Edinburgh in any historical sense. The name has stuck regardless, carried by the well itself for as long as anyone now remembers.
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