Can enough money be raised to restore an important Edinburgh landmark in time for next year's Homecoming?

ITS fluted Doric columns and elaborate carvings make it one of the neoclassical edifices that earned Edinburgh its title of "Athens of the North", but it honours a man whose fame is writ large in Scots vernacular.

Now, as next year's Homecoming Scotland celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns approach, an appeal has been launched to raise funds for refurbishment of the city's imposing but neglected Burns Monument on the lower slopes of Calton Hill.

Erected in 1830, the circular neo-Grecian pepperpot was designed by the architect Thomas Hamilton, in a free adaptation of the ancient Athenian Choragic Monument of Lysicrates – as he had done for a similar memorial to Burns at Alloway – and he declined a fee for the job. It stands almost as a miniature companion piece to his similarly neoclassical Royal High School across the road. Today its elaborately carved lyres, friezework and other details are badly weathered, while previous "quick-fix" asphalt roof repairs are letting in water.

The City of Edinburgh Council and the Edinburgh World Heritage Trust are anxious to repair the "temple" but, having pledged money and resources towards the repairs, which are expected to cost some £350,000, are looking to the Robert Burns World Federation to raise the anticipated shortfall of £46,000 required before work can begin. The federation has duly launched an appeal among its membership. The monument, says the federation's James Shields, "has been very sadly neglected, both internally and externally. I was up there yesterday: there's a broken window and pigeons had got in and there were droppings on the beautiful floor. However, it's restorable and will be restored." Ideally, Shields would like to see the memorial become a focus of outdoor poetry and music events.

If the requisite funds are forthcoming, work could start in early spring and be completed by the summer, according to David Hicks, communications manager for EWH, which is managing the job. It is part of the £1 million Twelve Monuments project, in which the trust is engaged jointly with the council to restore some of Edinburgh's best-known monuments.

The currently locked-up monument looks across to Holyrood and Salisbury Crags, and down to Canongate kirkyard, where Burns's great platonic love, Agnes "Clarinda" McLehose, is buried, as is his "elder brother in misfortune, by far my elder brother in the Muse", the Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson, over whose pauper's grave Burns erected a stone (the receipt for which was among some Burnsian relics originally secreted in the monument, but is now kept in Edinburgh's Writers' Museum). Not that the man himself is there to savour the view: Burns – or at least his white marble statue by John Flaxman – was removed to what is now the Scottish National Portrait Gallery as far back as 1839, supposedly because it was being stained by soot from a nearby gasworks chimney.

At a time when Edinburgh is swelling the ranks of its public statuary, with the pioneering physicist James Clerk Maxwell erected in George Street just last week and figures of the economist Adam Smith and fire superintendent James Braidwood installed within the past few months, might the proposed restoration present an opportunity to replace Burns's effigy in its original setting? The gallery itself, after all, is due to embark on a major refurbishment.

Shields doesn't think so. "It will be seen by far more people coming through the doors of the Portrait Gallery. We have a wreath-laying ceremony at the statue in the Portrait Gallery every 25 January and we get a good-sized crowd."

Meanwhile, just across from the monument, Hamilton's greater Greek revival masterpiece, the Royal High School, one-time parliament building-designate, lies in the doldrums, the Scottish National Photography Centre proposed for it and endorsed by city council, Scottish government and Sir Sean Connery still awaiting funding. This is hallowed ground in the annals of photography: the pioneer calotype photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, whose studio was in nearby Rock House, took an early photograph of the High School from the Burns Monument in 1843 – indeed, they also photographed Burns's daughter, Isabella, around the same time, a unique photographic link with the Bard.

Such a photography centre would certainly bring badly needed new life to the High School, and to the matching memorial to the man who, after all, extolled the virtues of seeing ourselves "as ithers see us".