Bath Night

Posted by Colin Harvey May 20, 2009

On Saturday night Kate and I decided on a whim to visit the Roman Baths at Bath (Spa), the setting for one of the largest leisure and religious complexes in Roman Britain.

Since its discovery, archeologists have patiently excavated the site, room by room, layer by layer. The site was occupied for over three hundred years, and gradually grew in size; businessmen held meetings there vying to surpass each other with the number of slaves oiling and massaging their bodies, and scraping their skin clean after immersion in the saunas; petitioners offered sacrifices to the gods and wrote elaborate cursabout those that they thought had wronged them; families picnicked and couples flirted,sometimes perhaps making love in the alcoves set back from the baths, for mixed nude bathing was customary, and one noted effect of warm baths and saunas is to raise the libido.

Now open to the public, the baths are an eerie sight in the evening, with wraiths of steam hanging just above the surface of the water, while ghostly holograms haunt the corners. We borrowed audio-guides that hung around our necks, easily operated and providing as much or as little information as we wanted, but the hands-free set-up wasnecessary given the uneven floor in places, and studied the mosaics, the fragments of wall murals recovered, and listened to the sounds of a vibrant community brought back to life almost two millenia after its heyday.

To anyone who wants inspiration for fantasy settings, I'd urge you to visit places like Bath Spa, Borgarnes in Western Iceland -- anywhere that recreates a long-vanished world as such sites do. I find that they provide far better inspiration than reading the latest best-selling tome recycling Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. Look for your inspiration in the real world, with all its attendant strangeness -- there'll be such sites in every country in the world.

It was an enjoyable, stimulating and above all educational evening, and I want to go again. Now, to start plotting that fantasy...