Bowl or ball?

More on the Elizabethan garden at Kenilworth Castle. One of the artist's reconstruction drawings that I have seen shows a ball upheld by statues as the central feature of the fountain. This is presumably based on the letter written by Robert Laneham which is our only surviving description. However, I'm not sure that this particular reconstruction drawing is correct.

The appropriate passage from Laneham's letter is quoted in an earlier post, and part of it has probably been translated from "theyr hands vphollding a fayr formed boll" to "their hands upholding a fair-formed ball". However, the word "boll" is used elsewhere in the letter to mean "bowl" as in "fyrmenty boll" - "frumenty bowl". Elizabethan spelling is not very consistent: see Laneham's spelling of fountain in the extract in the earlier post. However, their spelling tends to be more phonetic, and similar words throughout the letter (thunderbollts = thunderbolts, bolld = bold) use oll for a "owl" sound, and never an "al" sound.

I'm guessing that (in the passage describing the figures in the central feature) Athlaunts has been translated Atlantes, and that that is the reason that the ball features in the reconstruction (because an Atlas figure typically upholds a terrestrial globe).

However, the current English Heritage release contains a different reconstruction drawing and description that does use a bowl, rather than a ball so it will be intriguing to see how the final fountain ends up. I'm sure, though, that English Heritage will get it right.