Livy's Adventures

Oh Lordy, make me rich rich rich so I can buy me a summer-house in Bath. Just a little one would do. I wouldn’t need much room as I wouldn’t be in very often. I’d bathe everyday in the baths, obvi, eat Cornish pasties everyday, again obvi, and spend all the hours in between walking up and down the Circus pretending I was Anne Elliot and that Captain Wentworth and Mr Elliot were all vying for my affections! The abbey is incredible. Built on the site of a Roman sacred space close to the Roman Baths. The tour of the Roman Baths takes you from what would have been the balcony lined with timeless statues of past Romans silently observing the turn of countless visitors of endless years surrounding the main bath underneath what was apparently a huge domed roof to the temples and other rooms underground. The ruins are incredible in their eerie magnificence and telling of the ancient magnificence and fortitude of Rome. Considering the immediacy of our Western modern culture and our waste it’s humbling to walk through stone so expertly wrought and engravings so expertly carved that they can be viewed by my eyes in the 21st century so long after their being abandoned. Bath, and England in general I think we’re discovering, is layers of ‘old’. Prehistoric to Roman to ‘Dark Age’ to Saxon to Norman to 19th century to current, well current hardly exists. In Australia we sometimes think ‘current’ is so much more significant because we easily forget about the fact we house the oldest living culture in the world. We skipped Salisbury and headed to Avebury instead. It’s another Prehistoric site like Stonehenge but older and Lonely Planet reckoned it was more rewarding. We figured that we’d seen enough old buildings and cathedrals for a while and that Avebury might be a bit more unique. The whole landscape responds to sites like Avebury in other sacred sites that are obviously significant in some lost way, like the random scattered mounds. It’s all just really cool.