Hämmelsmarsch Fountain

Count the sheep. There are five of them, walking in bronze around a hexagonal basin of red basalt, followed by four musicians and two children. Water runs out of the instruments.

This is the Hämmelsmarsch — the sheep march — and it is not an invented scene. It's a real procession, and if you're here in late summer you may well hear it. A band walks through the streets playing the same tune to announce the Schueberfouer, the funfair that has run in this city since the fourteenth century. The sheep once walked with them for a practical reason: they were the prizes at the fair's shooting galleries, and the showmen paraded them through the streets as advertising. It worked so well that towns all over the country took up the march for their own fairs, sheep or no sheep.

The sculptor was Wil Lofy, a Luxembourger, who worked on it through 1981 and 1982. He put himself in it. The accordion player is a self-portrait, which is worth knowing before you walk away, because you have almost certainly just looked at the artist's face without realising whose it was.

The fountain was unveiled on the 21st of August 1982, timed for the opening of that year's Schueberfouer. Four decades of water and weather left the bronze green and the stonework furred with limescale, so in October 2023 the whole sculpture was lifted off its base and sent to a French workshop. It came back cleaned, was set down again in March 2024, and the water was turned on once more.