Our next destination, the city of Bath, is nearly 100 miles west of Windsor, which gave us ample opportunity to observe some of the English countryside from our tour bus. We found the countryside to be generally scenic, and we passed through some interesting-looking little towns. And we also discovered that a lot of canola is grown in the area.


You might be wondering why we were interested in visiting this city and why we were willing to sit in a bus for 100 miles to get to it. To be honest, we were mostly interested in the tour's other two destinations, Windsor Castle (see previous page) and Stonehenge (see next page), and we didn't really know too much about Bath before arriving there. But there turned out to be much to see and do in Bath. Unfortunately we didn't get to see and do everything we wanted to, as the tour only allocated 90 minutes to the city, including time for lunch. Probably the city's most prominent attraction, which you might already have guessed at, is that it's a nice place to take a bath.

When the Romans first arrived in the area around the middle of the first Century A.D., they discovered a large hot spring which was being used as a shrine by the Celtic Britons, devoted to a goddess of theirs named Sulis. The Romans found Sulis to be similar to their own goddess Minerva (which in turn came from from the Greek goddess Athena) and decided they were the same goddess, using this contention to facilitate the adaptation of the Britons into Roman culture. They established a settlement they called Aquae Sulis (waters of Sulis) and built a temple to Sulis/Minerva near the spring around 60 A.D. And where Romans went, public baths followed, so over the ensuing decades a bathing complex evolved which made use of the mineral-rich, pre-heated water.

When the Romans left in the 5th Century, the baths fell into disrepair. Over the centuries they were still visited, and underwent restoration from time to time. They enjoyed a revival among the aristocracy during the Elizabethan era, and many among the nobility and even the royal family came to bathe in and drink the waters to remedy a variety of real or imagined disorders (with varying degrees of success). Jane Austen and Charles Dickens spent time in Bath in the 19th Century, though neither seems to have enjoyed the experience very much. Austen actually lived in the city from 1799 into 1805, and used the city as a setting in her novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Dickens satirized the social life of Bath in his novel The Pickwick Papers, and used Mr. Pickwick's servant, Sam Weller, to describe the city's waters as having "a very strong flavour o' warm flat irons". Also in the 19th Century, an extensive makeover gave the Roman Baths complex a look it's pretty much maintained up to the present day, along with a surge in popularity.

The 20th Century brought more visitors, but it also brought the Luftwaffe, which bombed and strafed the city in 1942 in a series of three raids which have come to be called the "Bath Blitz". These raids, a response to the RAF's bombing of the city of Lübeck, killed 400 people and injured another 1,000, and damaged or destroyed thousands of buildings. Most of the damaged buildings have since been repaired, replaced or removed, but signs of the raid apparently still exist. As recently as 2016, an unexploded 500-pound bomb was found on the site of a former high school. It was successfully removed and blown up.

On our arrival in the city, our tour guide took us over toward the Roman Baths. On the way, we noted some of the city's more pedestrian-looking attractions. But there was history lurking everywhere. One of the pubs, called the Saracens Head, was where Charles Dickens stayed during his first visit to the city.


Near the baths we passed a large church. This was Bath Abbey, a parish church on the site of a Benedictine monastery that had been founded in the 10th Century. The church was last rebuilt in the 16th Century, in English Gothic style, and was heavily restored in the 19th Century. We weren't able to visit the church, as we only had an hour to explore the city (we spent it exploring the baths and eating lunch), after our guide turned us loose. The interior photo below came from Wikimedia Commons. We took the exterior photos, though. In the picture of the entry side of the church, you might be able to see stone angels climbing stone ladders. The angels are apparently attempting to reach heaven by climbing Jacob’s Ladder.


Adjacent to the entrance to the baths, there was another entrance, this one leading to the Grand Pump Room. The present building dates back to 1706, which was before the nearby Roman ruins had been discovered. It had been built as a place where visitors could drink the waters from the hot spring, which were pumped in. This is still possible, but the menu has since been expanded considerably, to include actual food. Jane Austen was familiar with the Pump Room, and used it as a meeting place for her characters in the novels mentioned above.

The Pump Room was once more extensive than it is today, but part of it was taken over, to act as an entrance hall for visitors to the Roman Baths. Like us. We filed into the entrance hall after waiting in a line outside for a few minutes. We waited some more in the hall while our tour guide took care of administrative details, and then he left us with audioguides hanging from our necks, a time by which we needed to be back at the bus, and some suggestions on things we could do until then. We decided we would look at the baths and at a small on-site museum, find some lunch, and then play it by ear depending on what time it was.


On the way in, we noticed a couple of models of the site. One showed the site as it exists in the present day, and the other showed what it probably looked like (more or less) in the 4th Century.

One of the big differences between the models was in the area of The Great Bath, a large pool which appeared to be indoors in Roman times and outdoors in present times. In either time, this looked like the place to be, so we headed for a door that took us to an outdoor walkway. The first thing we noticed was that the Great Bath, which had been at ground level all those years ago, was now below the level of the street by about 15 feet. The walkway we were on was a terrace from which we could look down at the bath. The terrace was lined by railings (to keep non-paid customers out and to keep paid customers from falling into the pool) and by 19th Century statues of Roman emperors and governors.



The Great Bath is a little more than five feet deep and is filled with algae-green water that is piped in from the hot spring (referred to as the "Sacred Spring") nearby. The bath is lined with 45 sheets of lead, which is the original Roman lead, and the pipes are the original Roman lead pipes. Around the pool there are some column bases that project a foot or two into the pool from the sides, but everything above the pool and the column bases was built in the 18th Century or later, mostly from local stone that has a distinctive goldish color. Swimming in the pool has not been allowed since 1978, when a young girl died from meningitis after swimming in it (tests of the water revealed the presence of a dangerous amoeba). Visitors who would like to immerse themselves in a safer version of the water can visit the nearby Thermae Bath Spa, which opened in 2006 and is full of 21st Century comforts.

After gazing at the Great Bath for a few minutes, we found a stairway that took us down to water level for a different perspective.


Most of the construction that gave the Great Bath area its current look was completed by the end of the 19th Century. Here's a comparison:

The Roman Baths were more than just the Great Bath, though. The Romans were sophisticated bathers who liked to move between pools of water with contrasting temperatures. These pools were smaller, and their remains are found in rooms to the east and west of the Great Bath.

At this point we started exploring the museum. Part of the museum features remains of the Sulis-Minerva Temple. In particular, part of the temple courtyard has been unearthed, and some sculpture from the temple pediment is on display.

Here are some more artifacts we found in the museum:




At one point of the museum there is a window through which visitors can view the Sacred Spring. Ever since Roman times, the Sacred Spring has been producing more water than the complex can use. The Romans set up a conduit through which the excess water is piped off to the nearby Avon River, a system that is still in use today. At the point where this stream of water leaves the museum, we noticed that one of our fellow visitors had managed to drop his audioguide into the water, and the museum staff was engaged in fishing it out.


We finished with the museum and exited the Baths complex, noting that there wasn't really time to do much of anything else before we needed to get back to the bus. We headed back up York Street and quickly found a pastry shop that sold savory pastries we could take with us and made our way back to the bus, which was parked near the River Avon, which passes through town (a different River Avon from the one that passes through Stratford of Shakespeare fame - there seem to be a few Avons). We had a minute to walk over and take a picture of the river, which had an interesting bridge crossing it upstream.

We left with a sense of not having seen nearly all there was to see in Bath. Maybe next time. But the day was short, and we needed to leave ourselves time to see the last destination of our tour: the unique, mystical rocks of Stonehenge.