St Bernard's Well

About this audio guide

This guide to St Bernard's Well in Edinburgh follows a foul-smelling spring three schoolboys stumbled on in 1760, the eccentric judge who built a temple over it, and the portrait painter Henry Raeburn, who owned the land next door. As word spread that the sulphurous water could cure anything, visitors flocked to the valley each summer, and Raeburn, with his son's business freshly bankrupt, began looking at his fields differently. Ann Street, laid out just uphill, still carries his wife's name.