A Slice of Life
Bill Lites
Our Trip To The UK Part 3
By Bill Lites
Now, We headed northwest to our next stop, to visit the city of Bath, best known for its famous hot springs. The city was first established as a spa town about 60 AD, when the Romans built the famous baths around the hot springs. Archaeological evidence shows that the site of the Roman Baths’ main spring may have been treated as a shrine by the Iron Age Britons, and dedicated to the goddess Sulis. Messages to her scratched onto thin metal sheets, known as “Curse Tablets” or “Binding Spells” have been recovered from the springs and were used throughout the Greco-Roman world, as a method where someone would ask the gods to do harm to others. For example, “May his body itch all over for the rest of your life.“ For a price, tourists can still buy a small copper “Curse Tablet” to scratch a curse on, and leave it in the hot springs for Sulis to read and act upon. The Roman baths have been popular down through the ages, including the mention of “Taking the Waters” described in Charles Dickens’ novel The Pickwick Papers.
We visited the amazing “Museum of Costume” which displayed some of the most beautiful and elegant attire from the 18th century to the present (including dresses only Twiggy could wear). Then we had afternoon tea and the famous Bath Buns at the Grand Pump Room, while being charmed by a soothing chamber ensemble. One of the interesting features of the Pump Room was the small fountain of “Healing Water” that everyone was encouraged to sample. It was said, that this water had great healing properties, and there were supposedly many testimonies of people being healed of all manner of ailments by drinking this water. It had a very strong odor and taste of sulfur to me. But then who am I to complain, if I’m being healed by drinking a small glass of smelly water. Right? DiVoran reminded me that the Pump Room was a favorite place for the author Jane Austin to visit and to set her characters into, and wondered if she ever drank the water?
Up the road a few miles from Bath, we came to one of the most interesting parts of the trip, to me, the “Fleet Air Arm Museum” in Yeovilton. Now this is my kind of museum, lots of neat airplanes that you don’t usually see in U.S. aviation museums. Of course DiVoran took a nice long nap in the car while I was browsing through the museum, admiring the wonderfully restored British Naval Aviation aircraft and their histories. I’m not sure why they had the Concord 002 prototype aircraft, but it still had a lot of the flight test recording equipment installed in it, and visitors were allowed to walk through it at will.
Most of the B & Bs we stayed at were very nice, but then there were a few that were great, and i just have to tell you about them. The Whitmoor Farm in Doddiscombsleigh, near Exeter, was one of the nicer ones. Mrs. Lacey was an older widow who ran the Whitmoor Farm B & B all by herself and did a wonderful job of making her guests feel special and at home in her home. An example of her hospitality was that she would pick fresh raspberries for our breakfast each morning. Yummm! Raspberries and cream. They were ripe, sweet, and oooh, so delicious!
—–To Be Continued—–
Old Things R New 