bath time

Bath, what an intriguing yet banal name for a city. We’d thought on this trip that we might get the opportunity to visit this place at last after having previously driven past, in 1984, due to time constraints.

And better still, on the way were a couple of other intriguing places: Bourton-on-the-Water and those two other villages which sound as if they should feature in an Agatha Christie novel, Lower Slaughter and Upper Slaughter.

So we set off on Monday morning, Mary navigating this time, for the journey down to Bath, via B-o-t-W, and back via the Slaughters. Probably 50-60 miles each way, on a bright, clear day.

Mary’s comment:
We drove to Bourton-on-the-water on my brother Peter’s recommendation from when he stayed there many years ago. It’s a lovely place but there were no trout visible in the stream whilst we were there. And the water level was very low. Some of the ducks were standing up! It is a lovely place however, but as a base for a week, this spot of Chipping Campden has a lot more going on.

With only a couple of minor navigation problems (many, many, small roads and weird place names) we rolled in to Bath at about 11:30am and parked the car in the Long Term carpark just south of the Royal Crescent for a rather hefty £5.40 for the minimum four hours. From here it was an easy walk downhill to the attraction most important to us, the Roman Baths.

Mary’s comment:
Bath was great. I was surprised at how easy it was to find our way to a parking area and then to walk to all the attractions. I know of Bath from Georgette Heyer’s regency novels which Peggy Ford and I used to devour as teenagers. It was amazing to walk the same streets that she was talking about in her novels all set in the 1700s. There was also a Jane Austen house with a dummy dressed in Victorian clothes outside the door of the place where apparently she’d stayed. A bit kitschie I thought. (Like all those Mozart impersonators in Vienna and the pretend gladiators outside the Colosseum in Rome!)

Back to Kev
Bath is a city now because a hot spring emerges from the earth there. Before Roman times the ancient Brits congregated around the spring, (evidence: numerous flint arrowheads found around it) but the surrounding area was marshy and bounded on three sides by a river.

The Romans, who arrived about 2000 years ago, treated the spring as something magical but that didn’t stop them from transforming it into a tourist attraction. (Monty Python: “What did the Romans ever do for us?”) And of course it provided employment opportunities for hundreds of locals and colonizers for about 300 years. With the withdrawal of the Roman culture the location seeped back into the past, the building blocks were plundered and the springs built over until rediscovered as a potential tourist attraction only in the late nineteenth century.

I must say that the present management of this major World Heritage Location has done a marvellous job of hitting the right balance between allowing public access and presenting the facts. Disneyland it isn’t, but it doesn’t hesitate to use modern technology to get the message across. The £10.50 each (aged person concession price) was well worth it, I think. More info here.

We could easily have spent much longer examining the engineering (much of it still performing its original function) and artworks left by the Romans but we left after 90 minutes, aware that we had to eyeball a couple of notable relatively modern pieces of architecture before finding our car again and then wending our way back to the north.

Mary’s comment:
Then we set off for the Slaughters. Upper and Lower Slaughter are two extremely picturesque villages here in the Cotswolds. Very quiet however but with trout (Kev: or grayling) in the streams in both places and many people (artists) painting by the stream. There was an art exhibition on so I investigated and came out with a few purchases.

Mary’s comment:
This last couple of days have been bright and sunny and quite warm. We’re down to short sleeves and Kevin has put on shorts for the first time (Kev: in the UK, anyway, this holiday, and only briefly, in the Volunteer Inn).

We’re off to one of the six pubs in town now for dinner. It’s a balmy Tuesday evening in Chipping Campden.

Location:Chipping Campden