Qualla: Ross Fountain

Ross Fountain: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stuart Caie from Edinburgh, Scotland, CC BY 2.0. A gunmaker walked into the Great International Exhibition of 1862 in London and bought a fountain. Daniel Ross paid £2,000 - a substantial sum at the time - for a cast-iron sculpture made in a French foundry, then gave it to the city of Edinburgh. It arrived at Leith in 1869 in 122 numbered pieces, was assembled in West Princes Street Gardens beneath the castle rock in 1872, and has been bubbling there in front of one of the most photographed views in Scotland ever since.

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Image: Stuart Caie from Edinburgh, Scotland | CC BY 2.0

Ross Fountain: Cast in Sommevoire

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Magnus Hagdorn from UK, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 - ship...

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Image: Magnus Hagdorn from UK | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ross Fountain: Under the Castle

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sourav Niyogi, (WT-en) P.K.Niyogi at English Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 s...

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Image: Sourav Niyogi, (WT-en) P.K.Niyogi at English Wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ross Fountain: The Long Restoration

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Shaw, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 launch...

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Image: Mike Shaw | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ross Fountain: A Donation That Outlasted Its Donor

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 ha...

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Image: Ad Meskens | CC BY-SA 4.0