Bath

Bath is probably best known for its thermal baths, which are well documented to have quasi-mystical healing powers. They once healed a hipster, who now lives a relatively normal life in a nice country cottage in Yorkshire.

From beside the Avon, where we had dinner one fair eve.

The little town itself is a rather delightful spot, with the Avon River running through it, and a variety of quite stunning buildings. The abbey is gorgeous, the Royal Crescent is quite beautiful, and the botanical gardens are very pretty and were at this time of year marvelously full of green life and crows beating up grey squirrels. The Holbourne Museum features an impressive and eccentric collection of art and objects, from bald oil paintings of unimpressed men to vases from the Orient to tiny and delicate miniature scenes carved in ivory, no larger than a thumbnail. How on earth do people get so incredibly skilled as to produce things like that? 

The Roman baths - below street level, the main chamber, which
would have been roofed in Roman times to keep in the heat

Still, the baths are particularly interesting, and central to the town's founding. The water in them is green and opaque, and steams when the air is cool. It is very warm. And the minerals and other things from the earth that this particular spring are of renown powers and don't taste particularly nice - at the end of the walk through the baths, you are invited to fill a small triangular paper cup from a tap and taste some.

Hot water in the baths

Cold pool in the baths, full of
coin offerings to gods

Although the true time of discovery of the magical properties of the hot water spring that bubbled up from the earth is unknown, the Romans had found it by 50AD and began to build the baths, along with a temple dedicated to Minerva, the Roman goddess of healing, and Sul, a Celtic god. Aquae Sulis was a sanctuary  a place of relaxation and rest and all the other things Romans got up to in the public of their own baths

You can see the baths today, though of course they don't look exactly like they did in Roman times. The city has gone through movement of people and fashions in the last handful of thousand years (including various monastery sackings, which were all the rage for a while). The original baths were changed and altered several times, and the springs were rehoused in the famous 18th century buildings familiar in certain Jane Austen stories, and there is a Pump Room affixed.

What is a Pump Room? How did it get its name? I know it's for socialising and playing cards and gossiping and making witty, romantic exchanges whilst dancing in the midst of a well-executed cottilions. I also know it has its own set of rules (or at least, there was a display board of them in the Jane Austen house, where Austen once stayed and where I ate handfuls of some kind of tiny shortbread-esque biscuit when no one was looking). But does it have to do with pump shoes, or with water pumps, or pumping one's stomach when too much elder wine has been consumed, or fist pumps for a dance danced well? I do not know.

The Laws of Bath, in the Austen house

Today the baths themselves sit well below street level. The old ones have been restored inside their very English housing, and an attempt was made to re-Romanifiy them - now, above the main bath steaming softly in the early morning, statues of Roman figures look down and across at each other. Some of the old bath rooms have been excavated but are no longer full, though it's easy to imagine them writhing with Romans, or with fully-attired English roses all but fully submerged.


"Actually," Fabian said, (you'll recall I was talking to him) "the city of bath was founded when one of your human princes was banished from his own den because he had a terrible skin disease he caught from pigs and he didn't have good enough hunting or fighting skills to make up for it. So they kicked him out - which, I suppose, was a little rude, but really you can understand it... can't you?" He blinked. "So, rejected from his own species, he embraced the life of pigs, and wallowed with them in some hot mud they found in the middle of nowhere. And walking around covered in mud it was impossible to tell he had a skin disease, and so people thought he was cured and put it down to the hot water bubbling out of the ground. Then people moved into the area, put up some great buildings, and started chopping down all the forests and killing all the animals around."

"That's a nice legend."

"Legend!" He huffed."As a local, I think I know a little better than some... Antipodean." Foxes naturally struggle to pronounce that particular word, what with the vowel sounds and the way their snouts struggle with the slide of vowels to consonants in the very beginning and middle of the alphabet, but I was certain that he said it with a particularly snarkiness that was rather unbecoming and perhaps slightly racist.

"You're not a local!"

He lifted his snout and looked across it at me (my being higher, it was impossible for him to look down, but he achieved the same haughty effect). "I'm more local than you."

"You haven't even been to Bath! And by the smell of you I don't think you've ever had one." He made a face that made me suspicious I was losing any high ground I'd held. "I've been to Bath," I insisted. "And you can't even read."

"Oral legends. You know the power of oral legends, and oral traditions. You come from a country rife with them."

"How do you know anything about my country?"

He shrugged.

The inside of Bath Abbey, a working church

Buildings in Bath - quite beautiful, really

Dear Mr Tilney, sweet and a little bit patronising,
pumping Cathy in the Pump Rooms. Is it ok to use it as
a verb, or is that too dodge?

"We went to Stonehenge, too," I offered.

"Stonehenge!" He made an indeterminable noise.

"I can't quite figure out if you said that with scorn or reverence."

He just shook his head.

It was something worth seeing. The stones are large, and clearly quite heavy. How the devil did those people move them? Such effort must have gone in, and such a long time ago that that effort has fallen out of oral histories.

Today, you cannot walk up to the stones. There are so many archaeological secrets in the earth, and so many people who want to walk across them, it's simply not viable to have everyone walk up to them. Oddly enough, I am not compelled to say much about Stonehenge. Perhaps if I had gone on a misty morning, with the sun just beginning to light the world and colour the trees, with no one else around and the jackdaws that nest amongst the stones beginning to wake up and call.