plaque · Edinburgh

High Street Wellhead

The High Street Wellhead. The original wellhead or cistern in this position, probably of around 1675, had a chequered history. It was seriously damaged by a horse-drawn fire engine in January 1897 and rebuilt. The cisterns provided water from Comiston Springs via the Castlehill Reservoir for the inhabitants of the old town. They became important meeting places where long queues formed. They fell into disuse in the 19th century when supplies to individual houses became possible. The wellhead was rebuilt again and restored to use with basins and running drinking waster by the Edinburgh Old Town Renewal Turst and Lothian and Edinburgh Enterprise Limited in 1997.

Inscription drawn from imported open data, awaiting original TributeLegacy editorial.

Source: Open Plaques. Geographic data via OpenStreetMap.

Nearby locations in Edinburgh

Browse all memorials in Edinburgh

Data sources

Location records are drawn from open, licence-clean datasets, kept here with attribution and gratitude to the people who maintain them.

Open Plaques, dedicated to the public domain (CC0). See openplaques.org.
Wikidata, available under the CC0 1.0 Universal dedication.
Historic England, National Heritage List for England, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. War memorial records are drawn from open community datasets (OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, NHLE) — never from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is excluded.

Editorial descriptions, photography and tribute links are original TributeLegacy work, layered on top of the open data.