Bath
The highlight of any visit is the Great Bath, now roofless, with its elegant columns, ancient pavements and eerily green warm water
Above: Bath Abbey, with flying buttresses and a fan-vaulted ceiling. Above centre: The Thermae Bath Spa, where you can take the waters yourself. Below centre: the perfect Palladian architecture of the Royal Crescent
9th-century Prince Bladud – later King Lear’s father – suffered from leprosy. Banished from court, he roamed the countryside near the river Avon as a swineherd. One day, he noticed that his pigs, also suffering from the disease, were cured by wallowing in a steamy swamp. Immersing himself in the same hot, muddy waters with
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the same astonishing result, Bladud was soon able to return to his royal position in full health. When he became ninth King of the Britons, he founded a settlement at Bath around those hot springs as a sign of gratitude. According to the (admittedly imaginative!) chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, this was in 836BC; archaeologists have discovered vestiges of even earlier human activity in this area – around 8,000BC – but surmise that the strange steamy landscape frightened off potential settlers.
hree short words carved in Greek on the architrave of Bath’s elegant Pump Room, next to the Roman Baths, succinctly sum up this city’s enduring fame: “Water is Best.” It all began with a herd of pigs. The
When the conquering Romans arrived they were
mesmerised by the hot springs, believing that this must be where their world met the mysterious underworld. They built baths and a temple in 60AD, and called the settlement Aquae Sulis after the Celtic god Sulis, whom they identified with their own healing deity Minerva. A gilded bronze head of Sulis-Minerva was discovered in
Bath in the 18th century, and can be seen today, along with a number of other fascinating finds, at the Roman Baths. The highlight of any visit to the city is the Great Bath, now roofless, with its elegant columns, ancient pavements and eerily green warm water, gently steaming, and watched over by 19th-century Neoclassical statues. When the Romans left, beautiful Aquae Sulis fell gradually
into ruins, but the locals continued to use the springs, and by the 12th century the sick were coming from all over England to bathe in the healing waters. “Springs supply waters, heated not by human skill or art, from deep in the bowels of the earth to a reservoir in the midst of arched chambers, splendidly arranged,” wrote a contemporary chronicler.
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