Stewart Memorial Fountain is both a civic monument in Glasgow’s West End Park and the setting for a consequential reunion in Bella Baxter’s story. Its sculpted evocation of Loch Katrine and its changing fortunes as a public structure anchor a private encounter in the city’s material history: here, after travelling together through fourteen capital cities, Bella and Godwin Baxter meet Archibald McCandless again.

Setting and civic purpose

The fountain stands in West End Park, with Glasgow University to one side and Park Circus to the other. In the novel’s account of the site, this particular monument belongs to a wider civic landscape shaped by public works. The park’s steeply raked terraces were designed in the early 1850s by Joseph Paxton; the fountain, erected later, commemorates a campaign to secure a public water supply for Glasgow.

Its proper name is Stewart Memorial Fountain. It commemorates Mr. Stewart of Murdostoun, Lord Provost of Glasgow in 1854, who pressed for an Act of Parliament that enabled Glasgow Corporation to make Loch Katrine, thirty-three miles away in the Trossach mountains, the city’s principal public water source. The account notes that private water companies strongly opposed his effort. The monument therefore recalls not only an individual civic figure but also a contested change in the infrastructure on which city life depended.

Design and literary imagery

Designed by James Sellars and erected by the Water Commissioners in 1872, the fountain is elaborately carved with animals associated with the islands of Loch Katrine: a heron, an otter, a weasel, and an owl. At its summit stands Helen, the Lady of the Lake, holding an oar behind the prow of a boat. Her pose recalls the moment when Fitz-James beholds her in the celebrated poem by Sir Walter Scott. The monument thus brings a literary image into the public park while linking the city’s water supply to the landscape from which it came.

The distinction between the fountain’s correct name and McCandless’s mistake in naming it is treated as understandable rather than as a significant offence. That small correction suits the monument’s dual character in the narrative: it is a particular Glasgow landmark with a recoverable civic history, but it is also remembered through the personal experience of the characters who meet there. Its carved details and literary reference give the place a strong identity, while the scene depends on the simpler fact that it is a public setting where former companions can meet by chance.

The reunion at the fountain

The encounter takes place after Bella has taken Godwin on a world tour. She wanted to draw him away from his dogs; he used the journey, as she later understood it, both to broaden her knowledge and to distance himself from her. They visited hospitals or attended medical lectures in fourteen capital cities. On returning to Glasgow, Bella had become so attached to Godwin that she allowed him little freedom to go anywhere without her, even though she could not make their relationship into a marriage.

Walking one day by the memorial fountain in West End Park, Bella and Godwin meet McCandless again. The setting marks a return from travel to the city in which their relationships began, and the meeting reconnects two strands of attachment to Godwin. McCandless had first fallen in love with him while attending demonstrations in the university anatomy department; Bella’s account also describes McCandless’s love for her as bound up with his view of her as Godwin’s female counterpart. The fountain’s public openness contrasts with the intimate history brought into the encounter: it is a shared civic place where old affections and rival claims on Godwin briefly converge.

Damage, restoration, and significance

The fountain’s later history complicates its commemorative purpose. Around 1970, the authorities turned off its water and made the stonework into a children’s climbing frame; the sculptures were damaged. In 1989, as Glasgow prepared to become the European Cultural Capital, the fountain was fully repaired and its water restored. By July 1992 it was waterless again and surrounded by a high timber wall.

These successive changes place the monument between preservation and neglect. Its history does not end with the civic achievement it was built to honour: the fountain is altered, damaged, repaired, and once more deprived of flowing water. In the novel, that unstable public condition surrounds a reunion that likewise gathers past attachments without resolving them into a simple conclusion. The landmark’s civic memory and its role in Bella’s personal narrative remain together: an elaborately carved memorial, a reference to Glasgow’s water history, and the place where a journey’s return brings McCandless back into the story.