This month's museum pick...

The Bath Museum

You gotta love a town whose name
is what it is

Nobody ever forgets a city whose name is only one syllable long: Rome, Spit, Nice, Cork, Berne, Seoul. (OK, Qom in Iran tests the rule. And though Sequim in Washington State is pronounced “Squim,” that still hasn’t helped put it on most people’s lips.)

Bath, England, is one of those cities. Prosaically named after the great Roman baths that were first built there in 75 A.D. (and only rediscovered in the 18^th century), its renown goes back even earlier to a hot spring that had been a sacred gathering place possibly as much as 10,000 years.

The remains of the baths, some of the best preserved and most extensive Roman ruins in Britain, by themselves would be attractive enough to lure visitors to the town. But Bath is also located in the Cotswold Hills, the swath of rural wooded rises and pasturelands in west England’s Gloucestershire that are crisscrossed by some of Europe’s most beautiful  walking paths.

History not only spared the Cotswolds the indignities of developments and subdivisions, it bequeathed the region with some of Britain’s finest ensembles of Georgian architecture. From Cheltenham in the north south along the Avon River to Bath, there is a profusion of Georgian-Style neo-classical facades in public buildings, townhouses, banks, emporia and country manors. The picture postcards of Bath are just as likely to focus on the rich honey-like colors of those facades as they are on its ancient ruins.

But the Roman baths, which inspired two century’s worth of genteel folk taking therapeutic soaks in the elegant spas and bathhouses that sprang up during the Georgian Era, remain the town’s evocative centerpiece. The Roman Baths Museum, next door to Bath’s great medieval abbey, is open year-round except on Christmas and Boxing days (Dec. 25 and 26). Visitors who take the two-hour-plus tour of the baths come away with a great respect for Roman engineering and an appreciation for the spiritual beliefs that made them build the town they called Aquae Sulis (“the waters of Sulis Minerva,” one of Minerva’s aspects).

To the Romans, as pragmatic as they were, a hot springs that could spew 300,000 gallons of water per day, year after year, at a consistent 46°C (115° F) could only be a thing of the gods. So they built a great works at the spring, trapping the water in a cistern, then distributing to a Grand Bath where most visitors took their soaks, and a ritual bath, reserved for the goddess herself, where the devout would throw in coins, trinkets and sometimes jewelry to mark both their passage and their prayers.

The Romans directed excess waters from the spring through a tunnel and down a culvert to the River Avon. The works they built achieved a marvelous balance among human, divine and natural ecologies – warm waters for people in a dank climate to bathe in, a temple to honor the powers of a goddess and the helpful return of temporarily diverted hot spring waters to union with the river down slope.

The audio tour of the ruins ends in the Great Pump Room, an airy, high-ceilinged room where the natural thing to do is take tea or water from the hot springs and discuss how intelligently the Romans, a Mediterranean people, made their accommodation with cool, damp Britannia.

The baths, though restored, are no longer used as baths. After 2,000 years, there are limits to the durability of even Roman engineering. And Bath itself, now a World Heritage City because of its great historicity, is no longer the great spa it once was. The last public baths closed in 1978. However, there are plans afoot to restart the tradition in October 2002 (see the “Bath Spa Project” link below).  — Patrick Totty