in wide surge; the wall enclosed all
in its bright bosom, where the baths were,
hot in the heart.
--The Ruin
8th Century English Poem
One of the things that kept crowding into my consciousness was how old a country England is. We tend to think of US history as starting around 1776, but that seems just the day before yesterday in England. Our hotel in London was on Egeware Street, one of the old Roman roads into the city, and you could still find bits of the old Roman city wall if you knew where to look.
We had signed up for a bus tour of Bath and Stonehenge with a dinner stop at the village of Lacock in a pub dating from 1361, a hundred years before the War of the Roses. On the drive out of London, our guide kept up a running commentary, pointing out buildings and sights to visit when we got back as well as general chatter. “Prices for a flat in this part of London are less expensive than in the West End and by the way, that Tudor style building on the corner survived the Great Fire in 1666 and continues to be a home.” We wound our way through Chelsea, past churches and factories recycled into trendy restaurants, and past the Famous Three Kings pub (James I, Henry VIII, and Elvis).
Once we were out of the city, we passed canary-yellow fields of flowering canola, grown for oil seed, and pastures of spring lambs. Green hills falling away in ordered rectangles bounded by hedgerows. Villages and market towns, each with its Norman or older church, flashed past.
The city of Bath, a world heritage site since 1987, sits on low hills in the valley of the Avon River. The site of Britain’s only hot spring, it has been a place to go to ever since some achy bone-weary Celt flopped down in a warm boggy pool and discovered his aches and pains went away. The Celts built a temple to their Goddess Sulis, and basked happily in the warm mineral-rich water until the Romans happened upon the place shortly after they invaded. By 60 AD, the Romans had built a spa and a temple to Minerva. Minerva, the Roman version of Athena, became associated with Sulis and the whole complex was named Aqua Sulis. Clever chaps, those Romans, they kept the shrine, adding to it and making it more grand over 300 years. They just changed the god being worshipped; expediting the conversion of the Celts from their savage pagan ways to more enlightened Roman pagan ways. The lesson was not lost on early Christians either, many of the old churches and cathedrals in the countryside are centered in a grove of yew trees, sacred to the barbarians. Same church, different god, makes Sundays easier to tolerate, at least everyone knew where to go.
Bath has drawn travelers and tourists since the hot springs were rediscovered in Elizabethan times. Jane Austen lived in Bath for several years, locating Persuasion in and near the city. Ironically, she actively disliked the city, claiming it stifled her muse. Dickens was a regular visitor, and Bath is a locale in several works. To accommodate the crowds of tourists (today over three million a year), the town fathers rebuilt most of the inner part of the city in the mid 1700’s. Downtown is a confection of a city in buff colored limestone. A curious mixture of classical and Georgian, narrow streets wind past three-story row houses, each level sporting a different style of column—Ionic at ground level, Doric on the second floor, Corinthian at the third. Busts of Minerva and other deities adorn the front porches.
Buses disgorge tourists and day trippers in front of Bath Cathedral. Technically it’s an abbey since no Bishop resides in Bath, but who’s counting. Built from the same buff stone as the rest of the downtown, the cathedral features stone ladders carved into either side of the doorway. Angels climb upwards, taking care to hold their robes aside (tricky things, robes) so as not to trip themselves up. The presumed goal, a full choir of angels, adorns the wall above the rose window. I’m not entirely sure what the allegory is here, at least one angel on each ladder is headed down. While the abbey needs some serious restoration, you can still sense the whimsy.
The buildings around the actual Roman baths are replicas; nothing remains but the bath itself complete with the original Roman-installed lead lining. The hot spring, rainwater that fell centuries ago and percolated deep in the earth over many miles, still flows through a Roman-built tunnel system and into the main bath. Signs warn visitors not to swim in, drink, or otherwise touch the water. The official reason being it is not treated-that’s as may be, but the warm water also harbors a population of amoebas with the nasty habit of occasionally entering body openings or scratches of hapless tourists and eventually eating their brains.
We entered the main bath plaza through a well-kept museum. Statues and altars dedicated by rich people to Minerva-Sulis show how busy this place must have been. An entire Roman Legion chipped in for a life-size statue of their unit emblem, a wild boar, in thanks for victory over the barbarian hordes in some forgotten battle. Small stone and clay figurines of Minerva fill a case. They were manufactured by the locals and sold to visitors to leave as offerings. The locals gathered them up periodically and resold them. The figures were probably recycled dozens of times.
The museum has heaps of coins spanning nearly 400 years of Roman rule recovered when the main bath was drained in the 1800’s. Along with the coins the workmen found curse tablets, folded lead sheets about the size of a Post-it Note. Requests for Minerva to strike down one’s enemies, they were tossed into the water to be read and presumably acted upon by the goddess. The best one displayed is from a disgruntled bather asking Minerva to bring down hell-fire on whoever stole his clothes while he was swimming.
One museum case has fifty or more ring signets, each slightly smaller than a dime, made of amber, topaz, or other semi-precious stone and exquisitely carved with dolphins, horses, birds, or people. One theory is that these were offerings, but a second school of thought and the one that sounds right, is that they were the ring stones, held in their settings with wax. Bathe in a geothermal hot spring, the wax melts, and oh damn! I’ve lost my signet.
I think it was the curse tablets and the lost ring stones that brought the place to life for me. Real people came here, swam and soaked in the warm waters, bought souvenirs, ate their lunch. The spring still flows, the warmth still rises.
I dropped a quarter in a corner of the pool. For Minerva.
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