Bath

After Salisbury, we went to Bath.  There are two main tourist attractions in Bath: the old Roman Bath, built on a natural hot spring, and the Thermae Bath Spa, that also draws from the hot spring.  There are other things as well, of course.  It’s a nice, old town, with restaurants and museums.  I particularly liked this bridge:

There are also some famous, and scenic, neighborhoods:

But the baths–ancient and modern–weren’t the main reason we went.

The ancient baths are the best preserved Roman baths in the world.  They were built on top of a natural hot spring, and thus have a very unusual Great Bath–a large pool of hot water:

They also have the more typical baths from the Roman era: the caldarium, which was the hottest bath and more of a sauna, though it did sometimes have a small, hot pool; the tepidarium, or warm room, which usually didn’t have any water; and the frigidarium, or cold pool.