The Ross Fountain came from the iron foundry of Antoine Durenne in Sommevoire, a small commune in northeastern France that had become a centre of artistic cast iron in the nineteenth century. Durenne specialised in decorative ironwork - fountains, statues, garden ornaments - shipped across Europe and beyond. The Ross Fountain was one of his showpieces at the 1862 Exhibition, a tiered confection of nymphs, mermaids, and allegorical figures supporting basins. After Daniel Ross purchased it, the pieces were boxed and sent by sea to Leith, Edinburgh's port. The journey from a French foundry to a Scottish public garden took seven years. Assembly took longer than anyone expected, partly because some Edinburgh churchmen objected to the bare-breasted figures on what they considered moral grounds.

Position matters in Edinburgh, and the Ross Fountain has one of the best. It sits in West Princes Street Gardens, the long green valley that follows the line of the drained Nor Loch beneath the basalt cliff that holds Edinburgh Castle. Look from the fountain up the rock and you see the castle's south wall plunging hundreds of feet. Look the other way and you see the spire of the Sir Walter Scott Monument and the elegant Georgian terraces of Princes Street. The fountain anchors what was originally a marsh and refuse pit - the Nor Loch had been drained in stages from 1759 onward to create the New Town and, eventually, these gardens. Within a few decades, what had been a stinking bog became one of the great urban parks of Europe.

Cast iron does not love Scottish weather. By the 1990s the fountain had been off for years, its mechanism failed, paint peeling, structural joints cracking. An initial restoration in 2001 patched the worst of it but did not solve the underlying problems. In 2014 a campaign launched to fund a comprehensive overhaul; the budget grew to roughly £1.9 million. Conservators dismantled the sculpture again - a hundred and fifty years after its first assembly - shipped pieces away for treatment, and returned them to a fountain newly painted in an unusual scheme of turquoise, brown and gold. The Lord Provost reopened it on 8 July 2018, with the head of mission from the French Consulate present, acknowledging the fountain's French parentage. A new pump means it now runs reliably, and the paintwork is expected to last twenty years.

Daniel Ross died not long after presenting his gift, and the fountain became more famous than its giver. A nineteenth-century Edinburgh gunmaker who spent two thousand pounds on French ironwork to give to his city seems an unlikely figure to leave such a mark, but the fountain has now stood in West Princes Street Gardens longer than most of the buildings overlooking it. Edinburgh kept the gift, restored it twice, repainted it in colours Ross would not have recognised, and rebuilt the pump that drives the water. The figures still stand - nymphs holding fish, putti riding seashells, mermaids with arms upraised. Behind them, the castle rock continues doing what it has done for three hundred million years, oblivious to the fashions of fountain design.