Bath

Our final organized trip of the term was a visit to Bath, a city started when the Romans discovered the presence of hot springs in the 1st century AD, shortly after their arrival in "Brittania." When the Romans left, the city fell into disrepair before a new, Georgian city was built atop the ruins of the original. However, this did allow the preservation of some of the original Roman structures and statues, as they were not cleared out, just built on top of.

Our day started with a train delay and we arrived about a half hour later than planned. Once we had arrived at the station, we met our tour guide and began to walk. Bath is a very small city and our tour took us all the way across it, covering some of the historical and architectural high notes. However, the main reason for our trip began after a short lunch.

We had tickets for entrance and audio guide tour of the Roman Baths, where the exhibit covered everything from the history of the location, lifestyles of the Romans living in "Aquae Sulis," and a tour of some of the rooms which made up the original baths. This was a very cool step back into roman times, as many of the rooms have not been altered in 2000 years. The museum portion showed us a model of the original compound, portions of recovered architecture overlain with projections of what they most likely looked like when all of the pieces were in place, and artifacts recovered from the site over the years from coins to curse notes. The Romans had carefully excavated around the spring source, and then built piping systems to bring the water to different rooms, each with different purposes. Some were meant to be used similar to a sauna, some similar to a whirlpool, and some solely as swimming pools.

Roman Coins

Portions of the columns and pediment from the original structures

Head of the Minerva statue which was worshiped here

At the end of the tour, we even had an opportunity to drink the water, as it is infused with minerals from its journey through the British rocks over 1000s of years, and supposedly has healing powers. I'm not sure about the healing part, but you could definitely taste the minerals, and it had a pretty metallic aftertaste, although it wasn't actually as terrible as advertised.

Once finished with the Baths, we had a little time to kill, so one of my roommates and I headed to Bath Abbey, which is adjacent to the entrance to the baths. It was a pretty cool, very large and open, church, and we even happened upon a choir practice, so we had a bit of a soundtrack to our visit.

Finally, it was time to grab a snack and meet back at the train station, as a few of us were heading on from Bath to the northeast for a weekend hiking trip!