Roman baths and Regency romance

We caught the train  to Bath this morning (after a small struggle to find the car park and enough £1 coins for the meter).  We visited an excellent bookshop.

We started with the Roman Baths, which our lovely host, Susanne, had encouraged us to visit. They were too crowded with visitors for June's taste, but I loved the video re-enactments of Roman life and the idea that the thermal spring is still pumping out hot water today.

Then we visited Bath Abbey, which like all historic buildings has been built, unbuilt, rebuilt. Henry VIII has a lot to answer for.  It has stunning ceilings and stained glass and, as a result of the last rebuilding to fix sagging floors, now also has underground heating utilising the thermal spring.

June and I played dress ups in the Discovery Centre.

We walked up to the Royal Crescent  which is a full circle of Georgian terrace houses around a small park.  Susanne claims it is the first roundabout.

Several scenes from Bridgerton were filmed in Bath (which has also been the setting for many of my favourite Regency romances) so we walked down to Holbourne Museum, aka Lady Danvers' home in Bridgerton.  

The Museum has several portraits of actors performing dramatic scenes, on loan from the Somerset Maugham collection, and a lot of other portraits dating back to the 1600s.

By this time I was museumed out so we caught the train back to Bradford on Avon. Susanne took us for a drive to see a quarry where huge blocks of yellow limestone are still being quarried, and another stately home,  Great Chalfield Manor.

The pub where we had dinner was the Tollgate Inn, which by coincidence was where June and Gary stayed on a previous visit to England eight years ago.

We head off to Oxford early tomorrow to return our car and spend our last night in England.