A non-lockdown post, about Bath

We finally got to leave town for a little overnight trip. It's still not possible to travel too far--I mean, some places are open to travel, like some of the islands in the Caribbean, for example, but one needs to either self-isolate at some point in the journey or pay a lot of money for a rapid Covid test. So we are staying close to home for now, but at least we are able to get out a little more than last month. We decided to do a short trip to Bath. Many museums are still closed at the moment: the majority of ones in Bath have closed until the spring and summer of 2021, so you can't see everything you want to see there, but there is enough to do to take up a busy full day or a leisurely couple of days. 

I had been to Bath before, which you can read a little about from my blog archives ("The English Countryside") from 2006 when I visited my cousin in Swindon, but this was my husband's first time, and I was just as happy to go back since it's such a beautiful city.

I noted in 2006 that I thought it was a bit of a touristy city, and it is to a point, especially in the city centre where the Abbey and the ancient Roman baths are located, but you can easily walk away from that area and see Bath as a regular city, and it is indeed quite pretty. What I like is that the architecture is distinctly Georgian, which valued symmetry and architecture. According to Wikipedia, it's based on the classical architecture of ancient Greece and Rome--which makes sense, given its Roman history, but it doesn't seem to have the emphasis on columns as much as what you would find in London. Some of the larger buildings have them, but the row houses don't seem to, unlike in London where many of the rowhouse structures have at least one, if not two, pillars on either side of the front door. I also like that Bath is a bit hilly, so you can see layers of the city.

When we arrived at the train station, we walked around a little bit and just looked in the shops. It was raining lightly, and it was only around 7ºC outside, so it was fairly chilly (yes, even for Canadians because of the damp cold), and we came across the Bath Abbey, which was open to the public for viewing--and free!

The Abbey was actually built over some of the ruins of the Roman temple and baths complex--as churches often do to cover up the relics of different forms of worship, I've noticed in various countries. It was built in the 7th Century as a Benedictine monastery and has gone through various re-builds and restorations to become a church, but it seems that the general appearance and structure is the same. There are gravestones all over the floor and sides of the abbey, and I was hoping to find a really old one from that early time period, but over time, the engravings have been worn away by centuries of footsteps walking on them, so the earliest one I could find was from the 17th Century. There is a restoration project underway to revive the old gravestones as much as possible, so it would be interesting to go back after that is complete to see what was done, if I'm still living in the UK by that time.

There was another gravestone from 1704 that I thought was really interesting because it used the Old English spellings with an "s" that looks like an "f." I thought it was perhaps a remnant from German because until a few years ago, German notation used a letter called an "eszett" to indicate what would be the equivalent of 2 s's in English (e.g. the word for street, strasse, was spelled Straße), but apparently that isn't the case. It has more to do with the the difference between capital and lower cases s's in Old English, according to what I read. Anyway, as someone with a linguistics background, these little findings are the kinds of things I love to discover when I travel. The other thing I wanted to point out about the abbey is that it's such a great thing to travel in Europe with a different camera from what I've always had in the past. My camera has a 42x zoom lens on it, so I can actually get close-up shots of the details on the high ceilings of all the abbeys, churches, and cathedrals I visit now. It's wonderful because these are details you can't even see with your naked eye, but I can study them in more detail now than I ever could before.

After the Abbey, we grabbed a bite to eat for lunch at a local pizza place--one of the few places serving a hot lunch that didn't require a reservation and also had enough space for people, and then we headed to the Holburne Museum for the afternoon. We mainly went there for the older paintings housed there, but there was an exhibit of the works of Grayson Perry, who seems to be a very complex and sad individual, based on what I saw of his works at the museum. Because he is a cross-dresser (and, I believe heterosexual), the topic of most of his works has a sexual nature to them as he focuses on exploring mainly his own identity. Much of it is graphic in nature, so I neither photographed those works nor will present them here, but it was interesting to see an artist whose main medium to communicate social commentary is pottery. It's a form that I haven't really seen a lot in my visits to galleries. Most of the rest of the gallery was old portraits from the 1700s or so. There were a couple that were of real interest to me. One of them was a portrait of someone with the last name Pulteney, 1777. The name stuck out because there are shops and streets with this name in Bath, meaning perhaps this was a very influential family, and certainly enough so to afford to commission a portrait of their family member. But also, it was even more significant to me that it was done by a female artist named Angelica Kauffmann--and in all my travels to European galleries, I don't think I have ever seen any female artists from that time period, or at least that used their given name rather than a male pseudonym. That was so fascinating to me. The other picture was one that I found out I could not take a photo of because it was on loan from a private collection, but fortunately, a description and photo of it from the museum exist online, so you can see it here. I was drawn to it as a snapshot in time of what life was like in India in colonial times. 

The hotel lobby

We then went to our hotel, Henrietta House, which was a beautiful building. I think it's a rowhouse converted into a hotel, and it is quite cozy and elegant. All the rooms have chandeliers, and they have updated the rooms to have modern, clean, tiled bathrooms and USB outlets in the walls next to the bed. It was a wonderful place to spend the night, and we were happy to put our backpacks down and spend some time warming up there before going out for supper to a great steak restaurant.

The next day, we were expecting lots of cold and wet weather. All week they had been forecasting snow showers and then sleet showers for London and Bath, but while there was a bit of rain in the early morning, it cleared up, and most of the day was a mix of beautiful sunshine and clouds! That was a really unexpected blessing. We booked tickets at the Roman Baths museum--which normally doesn't require pre-booking, but just for now during the pandemic--and we went through the museum with the little phone devices they have so you can take a guided self-tour. I hadn't paid attention last time I went that it was not only a bath house build around these thermal springs but also a temple complex with a temple devoted to the goddess Sulis Minerva, the water and wisdom goddess. Sulis is the Celtic goddess of healing and sacred waters, and Minerva is the Roman goddess of wisdom, so you get a sense of how the cultures at that time mixed and created syncretic religious beliefs and practices. There is actually a spa next to the Roman Baths that offers time in the thermal waters as you can't go into the Roman Baths anymore--too old and not maintained for human use, so would be dangerous. But until the pandemic is passed, I don't really want to share water with strangers like that. According to the self-guided tour, the Romans were very vigilant about bathing and cleanliness, and I thought it an interesting pre-cursor to how in England, regular bathing became frowned upon as it was believed to be unhealthy. I remember learning that in English class in grade 10 when we studied Romeo and Juliet because there are characters taking their annual bath at this public bath location. I don't have the time or space to explore the evolution of bathing practices, but it's something I do find interesting.

We grabbed some Cornish pasties for lunch and then walked up to the Circus and Royal Crescent to see those fantastic examples of Georgian architecture. We walked around the area a little bit before heading to the train station to come home. Even though it was sunnier than we expected, it was still cold, and it was also hard to find a bathroom to use since there aren't a lot of public toilets. It may have been a brief trip, but it was quite lovely, and we can't wait to go back when more things are open and enjoy Bath when it's a bit warmer.

The Royal Crescent