Baths and The Abbey

 Hey y'all, we're back with another record of our day. We got up after getting varied amounts of sleep depending on which one of us you ask, and had breakfast at our accommodation before heading down around 9:15 to appear at our reserved time slot for the Roman Baths Museum complex. 

The reason Bath exists as a town is the result of the natural hot springs found in this location. Peoples from the various time periods and geographic locations have all come here in some way as result of these springs made up of ancient waters that first landed in the Mendip hills before working there way down into the earth where it is super heated, and pushed up on this very spot! Because the complex is a combination of Roman and Georgian architecture, and it's from these time periods we have the most material evidence and as a result is our primary lens for looking through the structure. 

The Romans built a bath and temple complex dedicating the location to Sulis Minerva, a syncretism of Sulis--the Dobunni tribe's local god responsible for the water that was used for the bath, and Minerva--the Roman God of Wisdom. They called this location, Aquae Sulis. Roman occupation lasted from 43 CE to the late third and fourth centuries CE, and as a result a good deal of Roman material culture was left behind. Here we are provided an idea of what the immediate area was like, and what people's lives were like when at the baths and how it fit into their life. 

After several hours looking at past Roman's lives, we had lunch, coffee, and headed to Bath Abbey. The abbey is no longer technically an abbey (no one from a religious order lives there), and hasn't been one for several centuries, but it's called one anyway. There we wandered around, went to a really cute small museum they installed recently (during the Bath Footprint project) before going on the tower tour's 212 steps to the top of the abbey. We learned about the bells, a bit about the clock (someone had to it behind it with a candle and buckets of water to avoid fire), and learned about the keystone for the structure even. 

We ate at an Italian place called Portofino. Libby had carbonara, Janet had sea bass and muscles, and I (Tommy--though I suppose that's obvious at this point) had lasagna. After dinner we scoped out the pickup for tomorrow's tour through the Cotswolds and headed home.

See you tomorrow with some pictures from cute villages.