Bath

May 18 Day 11

The city of Bath is built on the site of an ancient Roman bath. There is a natural hot springs here, and the Romans, wanting to feel much at home in their province of Brittania, built a proper bathing facility, with several hot baths, steam rooms, community pool, and social center. They really were quite advanced with their engineering skills to harness the heat from the hot springs to heat all of their baths and rooms. But when Rome pulled out of Bath in the 5th century, the bath fell into decay due to neglect, and when the Saxons moved in, they covered it up and it was nothing more than a hot, muddy swamp for about a thousand years.

It really was interesting to see something that was so old from the Roman period. It amazes me how something like that could be lost to history, but I guess the invading Saxons wanted to eliminate anything that was Roman or reminded them of the Romans. The Bath Abbey, built around 1200

The main pool of the Roman baths. The older stones at the base of the columns and surrounding the pool are the original stones from the Roman era.

Bath was discovered in the late 17th century and became a destination place for England's upper class. A completely new city was built during much of the 18th century to house the elite who came to bathe in the facilities and benefit from its healthful qualities. So the city is different from many in Britain in that the architecture is fairly uniform, dating from the same period of time except a small section of town immediately surrounding the baths which predated the building boom.
Some of the Georgian-era apartments to house the rich coming to Bath for the social season


Some of the rich were so lazy, that they hired a sedan chair to take them to the baths. A sedan chair was a small portable booth containing a soft seat supported by two poles and carried by two sedan chairmen. It would carry them from the bedroom, down a spiral staircase, and through the streets of Bath to the bath house. Many of the men were gluttonous and fat, and I suspect the women would have been too, except that they would not have been able to fit into corsetts.

The rich came to bath to show off their wealth, and some of the men really outdid themselves. THere was a certain style of men who were real dandies and they really outdid themselves in dress and costly apparel, and wore a wig that was so high that their hat had to be removed with the tip of a sword. This style of man was referred to as a "macaroni". I hear the words of a familiar song coming to mind: ("Yankee Doodle went to town....")

Some of our Kirkham ancestors came from bath. They were appearantly here before the building boom, and left sometime before Bath hit its peak in the late 1700's. They obviously weren't of the upper class, which is just fine. I'm glad that our ancestors were of the hard-working class. That's why they were such good pioneers.


One of the ways we toured the city was on a double-decker bus. These are tall narrow buses that navigate the narrow streets of the city without any trouble at all. They'll drive down a narrow street that in America would be a single-laned one way street, but here is two-laned, two way, with cars parked on either side into the street, and they barrel down the road with another car coming without giving it a thought. I can see how J.K. Rowling got her idea of the Night Bus.


I had two more Cornish pasties today, one for lunch and one for dinner, and I think I'll give it a break for awhile. They are good, but are meant to be eaten sparingly.