Bath, England

Bath

I had strained to hear the voices of the Minoans, distant ancestors of Crete, but my British ancestors (in the more literal sense) shouted in my ear, loud and clear. Though they came only somewhat indirectly from the southwest of England (more on that later), who would not recognize their compulsive storytelling, their looming sympathies, their expressive and foul tongues, their enthusiastic inclusiveness for all of Nature--down to snails, laboriously carved on the solemn acanthus leaves of their old churches? I was home, with my fellow descendants of Shakespeare, the Bard, who looks down twinklingly on their busy comings and goings. It seemed to me that English women in particular have soothing smiles and tenacious voices that crawl soothingly like cats licking your wounds.

My B&B

Bath is a strikingly beautiful town. I had found a comfy B&B up in the Bear's Lair, a lofty neighborhood from which I descended on hidden pathways into town, a blend of brisk commerce and Roman Baths and elegant Georgian architecture. All Bath is in stone, grayer up in the neighborhoods, tawnier when seen from on high, soaring Cathedral spires and uniformly soft calcite streets of 18th c. townhouses.

Cleansed by moist country air and rose bushes, I slept deeply in voluminous white linens, enscounced in pillows by the open window where a solstice sun climbed early. The night before I had headed down to town, to see what there was to see, crossing paths with exhausted climbers. I found the soft pale stone city below, and the thermal baths. I bought the Twilight Package at the Thermal Baths, which include aromatherapy steam rooms (jasmine! frankincense! eucalyptus!) among kids in smooching pairs, many of them Chinese, and old couples, a rooftop pool and dinner (overly buttered sole with a chatty Midlands couple whose English I could barely understand). Then I walked back in the quiet city, a few kids crosslegged on the stone streets outside a pub, up green paths under soaring gulls and birdsong, back to perfect sleep.

Bath Abbey--angels climb its facade

Mornings I jogged up steep Shakespeare Ave round the bright green tender grasses overlooking Bath. As I took the path down the hill again I realized that Holloway Road, which continues out of primordial shade into town, had been the Roman Road, and now is marked by a 19th c. poem in commemoration of a horse, "felled by a cruel blow."

A man of kindness to his beast is kind,

But brutal actions show a brutal mind.

Remember! He who made thee, made the brute,

Who gave thee speech and reason, formed him mute.

He can't complain, but God's all-seeing ee

Beholds they cruelty and hears his cry.

He was designed they Servant, not they Drudge.

Remember! His Creator is thy Judge.

Across the road is the Magdalen church, in continual use for 900 years. It was donated in 1088 by its Norman owner to the Benedictines of Bath Abbey, and in 1212 was a Chapel for an adjoining hospital for lepers.

Inside Bath Abbey

The beautiful Bath Abbey, whose vaults take gothic on a sinewy adventure in the Perpendicular style, was originally an Anglo-Saxon Abbey which achieved immortality when England's first king, Edgar, was crowned there in 973. In the 1090s it was restored as a Norman cathedral, and then was resurrected as the last great gothic church in England in 1499. Bath had sheltered the Americans in WWII, but all it got in return was a flag, on display in the Abbey. Its walls and floor are tiled with the gravestones of Bath's long past.

Temple of the Baths--Gorgon/Neptune
Courtesy Wikicommons

The centerpiece of Bath are the baths themselves. The Romans took Bath because of them, and adopted their Celtic goddess Sulis who morphed into Minerva. The water, that contains at least 42 minerals, came from rains that fell 10,000 years ago, then, heated by geothermic forces, filtered back up through limestone. I swear I felt the effects of my 3 hour spa for weeks. The tour of the Roman Baths begins on a terrace of stone Roman Emperors, whose visages were invented in the 19th c, the result being that Julius Caesar looks something like a soccer thug. They stand against the sky and the gothic turrets of the Abbey. Originally sheltered by a domed roof 20m high--high as the Abbey's soaring peak--but now exposed to the sky, the rusty waters are growing algae. The ancient waters bubble steamily from red soil at the rate of 1.17 million liters a day. The tour takes you over stones that were once the pavement of an enormous temple complex, among the daily lives of the Roman soldiers who built the monumental stone and brick (the local Celts lived in mud huts, so Gallic soldiers were imported), the grave of a Syrian, the remnants of temple carvings--a Neptune Gorgon, sun and moon gods, Hermes and Asclepius. There are hundreds of curses that had been written on lead fragments and thrown into the goddess' waters by the little people, seeking redress for their daily tragedies. There were tombstones and altars that had been erected, the former by the soldiers' guilds, the latter by rich supplicants. And there the complex baths themselves, where Romans gossiped, held forth, robbed each others, saw and were seen by a cosmopolitan gathering. Unique in Britain, were these Aquae Sulis. Seneca wrote of them:

Sulis/Minerva

"The picture is not complete without some quarrelsome fellow, a thief caught in the act, or the man who loves the sound of his own voice in the bath--not to mention those who jump in with a tremendous splash."

We continued up through Bath to the Circus, which is a circle of Georgian architecture, three levels with Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns respectively, part of which is used for social housing. Then on to the Royal Crescent, achieved by the same architect, where we stood patiently in an 18th c. townhouse museum listening to ancient ladies talk about the joys and tragedies of that life, squirming with kids from Eastern Europe who hid behind their foreign tongue. The last room, the 18th c. kitchen, featured a metal wheel that was kept turning by a running dog. This odious practice, unique to the southwest of England, entailed a hot burning coal at the dog's feet to keep it running. I was ready to leave Bath.

We recovered from that atrocity with tea in a beautiful restaurant (The Circus). The blonde wide-eyed staff glided our way with that British welcome, almost maternal in its encompassing sympathy.

Temple complex of the Roman Baths

My connection with the southwest of England is indirect. I have ancestors of 17th c. America who settled with Dame Deborah Moody, originally from nearby Avesbury, in the colony she founded in Gravesend, New York (now part of Brooklyn). Like her, they were religious seekers, who studied Anabaptism and Quakerism, and were driven to the colony by the religious intolerance of John Winthrop in Massachusetts. Called Lady Moody by her followers, she was considered by the authorities to be learned and venerable, but decidedly a Dangerous Woman.