Pagoda Fountain
The Pagoda Fountain is one of the most impressive and memorable features in the Gardens, using gravity to propel water up to 70ft into the air, almost touching the bottom of the Skyride capsules as they pass overhead.
It is well-known that the Pagoda Fountain as we see it today is not built to the original design that was commissioned by the 15th Earl. The architect, Robert Abraham, had originally envisioned a six-story Pagoda to sit on the island, as described by Loudon:
The pagoda was intended to be eighty-eight feet high. From the angles were to have been suspended forty highly enriched Chinese lamps, and these were to be lighted by a gasometer fixed in the lower story. Besides the lamps, there were to have been grotesque figures of monsters projecting over the angles of the canopies, which were to spout water from their eyes, nostrils, fins, tails, &c.; a column of water was also to have been projected perpendicularly from the terminating ornament on the summit of the structure, which, from the loftiness of the source of supply, would have risen to the height of seventy or eighty feet.
The plans were inherited by the 16th Earl and were scaled back to the three-stoery structure that still operates today. It was modelled on the To-Ho Pagoda in Canton.
