Bath

Five of us stayed in a nice Airbnb in the old section of Bath for two nights. Jo, Asher, Steve, Fiona and myself all walked into town for an English breakfast. Then we walked around the old town to locate the Roman baths, right next to the imposing cathedral. We bought tickets to enter the Roman Bath compex and were issued with an audio guide to listen to a description of the history of what we were seeing. It is a staggering complex of hot, warm, tepid and cold baths which takes several hours to go through. The complex was buried by the Anglo Saxon town for many years and was only discovered a couple of hundred years ago. As archaeologists gradually dug it out, there was a progressive understanding of what a huge Roman bath complex was built here. The reason the Romans built the complex in this location was because there is a unique source of hot mineral springs here bubbling up from deep underground.
The ancients believed the water was good for healing diseases so there were not only baths here for washing, but temples and religious structures for worship of the pagan gods.
The Romans built the baths in around 60 AD, about 100 years after Julius Caesar had conquered Britain in 44 BC.
There were many fascinating artifacts dug up as part of the excavations which reveal a great deal about the life and culture of the ancient people who lived in this advanced civilisation in Bath.
There were several layers of history here apart from the ancient Roman, and Anglo-Saxon. There was also the more modern English period of Jane Austens books when the aristocracy came to Bath to take the waters. The Pump Room, which is a location in her books, is still there and is a refined place to have a high tea while overlooking the baths.
We also went into the amazing cathedral which is 800 years old and a significant structure in the centre of town.
We then visited the Bath Circus, as it is known, which is a circular range of 30 residential townhouses built in a circle around a roundabout with five large 200yo Plane Trees in the green space in the middle of the roundabout. We also went to see the Royal Crescent, a beautiful semicircular range of 30 houses which overlook Royal Victoria Park. Famous and very expensive townhouses. On is on the market for 10 million.
We then walked to the Bath Christadelphian Hall, which was understandably closed on a Friday. We had dinner in an Italian restaurant before I went to a play in the Peter Ustinov Theatre in Bath. The play was Voyage Round My Father by John Mortimer who wrote the Rumpole series.Read more