osprey_archer | Bath, part 1

Back from Bath! Sadly my camera batteries gave out just before the art gallery so I can't regale you all with my Grand Theory about Victorian paintings of Spain and orientalism, but as I wasn't supposed to take photos in the gallery anyway I suppose it's just as well.

I did get some pictures in the Roman Baths, which I loved - walking where the Romans would have walked, and seeing artifacts they would have touched, and not just cracked shards of them but whole jars and ivory hairpins and an almost-complete mosaic.

The bath itself one is not allowed to touch, because it's full of algae and also wicked hot. The hot spring was sacred to the early Britons and then to the Romans, who built a temple there as well as a bath complex; people would carve curses onto sheets of pewter and pitch them in the water, hoping the goddess would help them recover their stolen coins or their gloves or their lovers.

Nowadays the only thing left of this custom is a wishing pool, which is the old frigidarium - the round cold pool where Romans cooled off after their paths. Toss in a coin and make a wish; the coins go to the excavations, and the wishes into the ether in the hope that they'll land lucky side up.