Beautiful Bath, England

Nicole strolls toward the historic Bath Abbey.

 

Bath is a beautiful city. Its architecture and history asked for more time than the few hours we had to give, but we were glad to have the opportunity to walk centuries old stone streets, enjoy beautiful 18th century golden limestone architecture, and explore a 2000-year-old Roman bath house. Many of the streets are lined on either side with stone columns supporting long, golden apartment buildings a dozen feet overhead. This ever-present, smooth, honey-colored limestone came from local quarries and is only found here. The clean, geometric layout of roads and consistent styling of the buildings is beautiful by design, owing to city plans laid out as early as 1754. If you find yourself near Bath, it’s well worth whatever time you can spare.

Romans flocked to Bath after the discovery of a thermal hot spring below the town. They built a beautiful bath house, for which the town is named, complete with hot rooms, cold rooms, steam rooms, oiling rooms, and this large, heated swimming pool. In the time of the Romans, this would have been fully enclosed with a lofty ceiling above the second floor.

 

The water in the main pool is now tinted green with algae. Unfortunately, it is laced with heavy metals, teeming with bacteria, and is now unsafe to touch. This photo also shows how the baths have been reconstructed. The floors and bottom few feet of the columns are original while the lighter bits above were rebuilt in modern times.

 

Josh waits to order at a pastry shop just around the corner from the bathhouse.

 

The streets were absolutely beautiful. Some of the romantic imagery Jane Austen describes in her novels was inspired by her time living here.

 

Nicole drinks the (purified) “healing” waters. It tasted like metal.