Free Bath (In The Sense That I Was Too Cheap To Pay Admission, But I Climbed The Fence)

So I did the starving student thing where instead of paying admission, I climbed up on the steps around the corner from the Pump Room and peered over the rail so I could get a free look at the baths. Unfortunately, since hoisting my chin over the rail required both hands, I have no pictures.

What I do have are old pictures from two years ago.

Here’s roughly what I saw by hoisting myself up to the rail. Picture an angle like this, with a side dish of pouring rain:

The Roman remains are about 20 feet under the modern city. They’re currently accessed through the Pump Room, a beautiful neoclassical edifice which was used for social gatherings during Bath’s fashionable Georgian heyday:

There’s a secondary pool, which, if memory serves, was used by 12th-century Norman kings, though I could be wrong—I’m relying on my memory of historical plaques I read two years ago:

And here’s a reconstruction of the Roman baths complex:

Every Roman settlement of sufficient size would have had a baths complex, but the one at Aquae Sulis—the Roman name for Bath, meaning Waters of the Celtic goddess Sul—was renowned for its healing powers.

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