21.09.2011 – 21.09.2011  17 °C

Very leisurely start today. I took quite a while to walk down to the town this morning mainly because I was continually stopping to check out the buildings! I spent my whole morning just wandering the streets of Bath and checking out the sites. I stopped in at the Abbey just before 11am to discover that the morning church service was about to start. I was quite surprised the Bath Abbey allows visitors to continue to wander around the Abbey whilst the service is in operation!! I personally found this quite rude so sat down in a pew to observe the service… some people seem to have no sense of propriety though; one particular lady decided to walk almost up to the priest (whilst he is in the middle of the service) and started taking photos of the roof of the church as well as him!!! I mean surely there should be a line somewhere?

Anyway, once I had sat through the service I then took a tour of the rest of the Abbey (the parts that weren’t really visible from sitting in the pew) before heading back out to have a bite to eat. Following lunch, I joined a historical tour of Bath (conducted by volunteers from the local council). It was really worthwhile as our tour guide took us all over the city pointing out points of interest. Bath has been occupied since well before Roman times and is world famous for its almost intact Roman bath complex. The complex was likely built around 40 AD and covers more than a good city block! Ever since the Roman’s tapped into the natural hot springs, Bath locals have been swimming in the healing waters. Today the only way to get a taste of this thermal pools is to pay and enter a commercially run spa complex completed early this century (plan for tomorrow I do believe!) Apparently up until the mid 80s Bath locals (and visitors) could swim in the hot springs by just using the local pool! Not so today!!

After the Roman’s left Bath it was very much a sleepy town, on the main route from London to Bristol, until Queen Anne reinvigorated the town by coming to Bath a couple of times a year to aid her pain relief for her gout. So began the boom (and the layout) of the current town of Bath. The Bath we see today is considered Georgian (18th Century) and is almost entirely built of Bath Stone (which I think is a softer version of sand stone). This means the town of Bath is pretty nice to look at.. all of the buildings are old sand stone like buildings that have been quite particularly built to exacting standards. What I mean by this is that every building is proportionally correct (compared to its neighbours) so that when you look down a street all of the windows are even, they are all placed in the same place as compared to the front door etc.. Very symmetrical looking with very clean lines.

Our walk around the town took many of the key sites of this architectural marvel, including the circus (row of houses completely built around a large round-about and built into a circle shape!) and the royal crescent (another row of terrace houses built in a crescent shape around a large piece of parkland). Bath is also the setting for a couple of Jane Austin’s novels so our guide pointed out the sites that she used as settings for her characters (I hadn’t read the particular novels that were set in Bath, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, so it was largely lost on me). On our return leg to the Roman Baths we also took a look at the Pulteney Bridge in Bath. It is a bridge that has been built upon so as you look across the bridge it actually looks like you are looking down a street (similar to the Rialto in Venice)!

We finished up our tour back at the Abbey and the Roman Baths. I spent the remainder of my evening wandering the streets hunting a hair dresser who would book me in for tomorrow for a cut and colour before heading back up the mile long hill (Christ the Bathwick Hill is long and pretty steep!!) to the hostel for a nice cuppa and some dinner.