Wot’ve the Romans ever done for us?*

Saturday 3 Oct (Part I)

You’ve got to admit, plumbing is a pretty good invention.

I left the mighty metropolis of Bude this morning, with the wind howling and the rain pouring, and made the 3 hour drive to Bath (I can’t be sure I took the optimal route … but then I don’t think there is one). I knew it was a Saturday—with tourists and locals likely to be out in force despite the weather—so I braced myself to mingle with the masses of the great unwashed (no, you can’t actually use the famous baths at Bath).

You have to feel sorry for the inhabitants of places like Bath and Oxford. What does it mean to be a normal resident, when your home town is taken over by teeming hordes of meandering camera-toting visitors who clutter up the shops, drift across the streets, and generate record-breaking values of the Heisenberg Tourist Effect? It seems kind of weird to me that even a church service can become an “attraction” as if it were a theme park ride at Disneyland. I suppose this all just becomes what is normal. However, oh citizens of Bath, I apologise for adding to the abnormality of your normal.

As is typical of much of my touristing, I went to Bath with no real plans of what I should do, except to see Roman baths (this is about the only thing I knew about the place). I now know a little more. Here’s an interesting fact for you: over 1 million litres of water comes out of the springs each day. That’s 1000 cubic metres, or half an Olympic swimming pool. Given that the water must have become pretty grotty (imagine the state of everyone’s feet!), continual refreshing was probably a good idea.

A point of clarification is in order too. The columns and terrace in the first photo are not Roman at all, they’re Victorian; only the blocks at the base of the column and the pool itself date back to Roman times, and the original pool would have had a huge roof over it, with part of the construction using hollow keystone-shaped bricks in order to make a lightweight arch. The Romans had some neat engineering ideas.

There were a number of different pools available, some at different temperatures to others. The photo at left above shows one such pool (the frigidarium (obviously, the cold one!)), now used as a sort of wishing pool; the smaller photo to the right shows a couple of “Roman” ladies, in the costumes and hairstyles of the time standing beside the larger more famous pool of the first photo. Not all of the complex has been excavated, but there are some amazing structures. The Romans had ducted heating, and, as suggested at the beginning, they certainly knew about plumbing. The photos below show an inlet pipe (about 75cm high) and an outlet pipe (about 1m high) still with water flowing through.

There was also an owl. It can be found on one of the sculpted panels of the pediment/portico of the temple to Sulis Minerva, at the bottom right hand corner of the circular part (and enlarged in the second photo below). The association of owls with wisdom dates back to the Greeks and Romans. In the photos further down you can see an image/mask of Minerva herself (goddess of wisdom, war and a whole bunch of other things (the equivalent of the Greek Athena, or the equivalent of the Gilbertian Poobah (Lord High Everything Else**)). This mask was found in the ruins at Bath.

One of the good but also mildly amusing things was the included provision of audio tour technology (someone paid attention to my earlier whinge about not supplying visitors with information for their visit!). This comprised a device like a mobile phone, and you entered the numbers associated with exhibits of interest, in order to find out more about them. The mildly amusing thing was looking out over the hordes of tourists who were all standing around in quiet isolated worlds of their own with these devices up to their ears (see third photo below). While this was an excellent and very flexible way of providing interpretation, I still would have liked a $2 pamphlet as I can read faster than I can listen and skip to the good bits. (There’s no satisfying some people, is there?!)

Having “done” the baths, I then wandered the streets for a little while, and crossed the Pulteney bridge, which has shops on either side. The little weir is interesting too (no, the boat doesn’t go down it: there’s a docking area and a lock over on the right side).

I then made my way back to the car park, found a cache (I didn’t organise myself properly to do any more), and continued my journey towards Oxford. There’ll be another blog entry to tell that story.

* From Monty Python’s Life of Brian; a quote in the true oral tradition of quotes: I have only heard it quoted by others since I haven’t actually seen the movie.

** Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado