Bath is known for its spring water and the Roman Baths that were built to take advantage of them which, the leaflet I have in my hand tells me, are the only mineral waters in the UK to be hot.
There are three springs in Bath where this water emerges, where it comes from is, again according to this leaflet, a bit of a mystery. One of these three springs feeds the baths in the hotel we are staying and so first thing this morning we were there sampling the waters. It was like taking a bath the water was so hot, approximately 35O C (leaflet again😉), and very pleasant but you couldn’t do laps (not that I do that sort of thing anyway) as the pool wasn’t really big enough for it so it was just a quick dip in and out.
Prior Park Landscape Garden
As part of our effort to try and do things a little different from the norm in Bath we today visited Prior Park Landscape Garden, a National Trust property just six minutes drive out of the city. There is no parking on-site and in any case we didn’t have a car so we got a bus there which stopped right outside the front gate.
Unlike most NT properties there isn’t a house to visit here. Well, there IS an attractive looking house but it is occupied by a school and it occupies a very prominent position looking down a steep gorge to a Palladian bridge.
There is a walk from the entrance that takes you up to the front of the house and then down one side of the hill towards the lakes at the bottom. We took a slight detour off to one side where we were rewarded with views over the skyline once again. This time there was an information panel there so we could identify what we were actually looking at.
Whilst admiring this view we got chatting with a local who was out walking his dog who told us (the man, not his dog) that the NT had spent quite a long time emptying and restoring the ponds and dams. On return, I looked it up and found that the ponds have actually been empty since 2017 and only recently refilled so that is quite a long time! I’m glad that we got to see the ponds full as it really is rather lovely.
Rather than get the bus back we decided to walk given that it was only a relatively short distance and it was all downhill. You can tell the sort of place you are in from the shops there and Widcombe, which was passed through on the way, had both a place selling wood burning stoves and an Aga shop so clearly not a deprived area!
The Roman Baths
It’s been a while since the last time I visited the Roman Baths. I’m fairly certain that I came here as a child, possibly as part of a school trip, and I think I have been here since then too but it has been a long time.
It being THE thing that Bath is famous for it was, of course, packed. As you walked through some of the smaller museum rooms it felt quite claustrophobic being in such a small space with so many people and consequently, we didn’t spend a great deal of time in this area.
The rest of the place wasn’t too bad and there was much more to see than I’d remembered. Areas such as a walk through what remained of the temple, the cold baths and the underfloor piles of bricks holding up the floors to provide heating. All of this must have been there on my previous visit given that the baths have been there since 60 AD.
I was disappointed to discover the pretty much everything you see above ground level in the picture below is, relatively, recent. Well, if you consider the late 19th century to be recent.
If I’m honest I think that what I enjoyed the most was the Roman remains that you could walk through rather than the baths themselves which were filled with green, scummy water!
