Roman Baths

Roman Baths, well-preserved public bathing facility built about 70 CE on the site of geothermal springs in Roman Britain, now in Bath, England, U.K. The hot mineral springs bubble up from the ground at temperatures well above 104 °F (40 °C), and the main one produces more than 300,000 gallons (1.3 million liters) a day. According to an embellished legend based on a story told by Geoffrey of Monmouth, it was King Lear’s father, Bladud, who inadvertently discovered the healing properties of the hot springs. Packed off to tend pigs on his own because he had contracted leprosy, he saw that his charges loved wallowing in the water, tried it himself, and was cured.

The spring at Bath was known to the pre-Roman Celtic people of Britain, and it was presided over by the Celtic goddess Sulis. When the Romans arrived, they called the site Aquae Sulis, “waters of Sulis,” and created a spa that became famous throughout the Roman world. It included a colonnaded temple to the goddess of wisdom, Minerva, with whom the Romans identified Sulis. The bathing complex was unusually extravagant in its use of hot water. The facilities were gradually enlarged to accommodate the numbers of pilgrims who traveled from afar, and the complex remained in use until the fourth or fifth century, when Saxons gained control of the area. The bather would progress through the tepidarium, or warm room, and then through a set of increasingly hot baths (caldarium) to a bracing plunge in the cold bath (frigidarium) and finally a wallow in the warm, steamy water of the Great Bath.

With four steps along all four sides, the Great Bath in its impressive hall was a place for meeting and chatting as well as bathing. People could stroll along the paved floor around the pool, and there were niches in the walls for sitting and watching the bathers without getting splashed. The baths were abandoned after the Romans withdrew from Britain, but the complex was excavated from the 1870s on. It is below the modern street level, and the Great Bath today is open to the sky and visible from the street. During much of the 20th century people occasionally swam in the Great Bath, but bathing there was closed to the public after 1978, when a bather died from an amoeba-borne illness that she contracted from the water. The Roman Baths were a factor in Bath’s being inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987.