England · Old Town
Bath
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Bath is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
The Roman Baths 1,500 points
The whole of it sits under the courtyard, so you cross the top of the thing before you are let in. Take the stairs down, and then keep taking them. Depth is my favourite direction and there is more of it here than anywhere else on the walk.
Bath Abbey 500 points
Two ladders run up the outside of the west face with figures climbing them, and not all of them are going up. Come at it from the square, not the churchyard side, so you meet the ladders first. Then go in and put your head back. The ceiling in there is what I put on this city's icon.
Pulteney Bridge 500 points
Do not judge this one from on top of it. Go round to the terrace on the far side and look back, where the whole thing sits above a stepped half-moon weir. Then go and walk it, and be told nothing at all.
The Pump Room 500 points
A grand room that is still in daily use as a room, which is rarer than it sounds. Look to the far end for the tall case clock and the musicians' gallery above it, and at lunchtime somebody is usually playing under there. Then look down. You are standing on the lid of something.
Bath Farmers Market 250 points
The far western end of the walk, over the water and off the ring, so plan it in or you will not get there. Come on a Saturday morning. On any other day the hall is still magnificent and completely inedible.
Queen Square 250 points
Stand on the grass in the middle with your back to the traffic. One whole side of this place is dressed up as a single palace, and it is really a terrace of separate houses with one face pulled over all of them. A very Bath thing to do.
Saint John the Evangelist RC 250 points
Its steeple goes up further than anything else around here, and it does that from the bottom of the slope rather than the top. Use it. From the river end of the walk it tells you exactly where you are, which is the most useful thing any building has ever done for me.
The Assembly Rooms 250 points
Go up to it, because it sits at the top of the climb and every smart address in the upper town was aimed at its door. From outside it is a plain box. A plain box with something hidden in it is exactly my sort of problem.
Name origin
Why it is called Bath.
Rome named the place after a goddess: Aquae Sulis, the waters of Sulis, who presided over these springs. The Anglo-Saxons dropped the goddess. In a charter of 675 the name is Hat Bathu, hot baths, and after that it is always the form that means at the baths. A whole city named after its plumbing, and not one word of apology for it.
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Nobody picked this spot for the defence or the trade. They picked it because the ground was already doing something. In the flat pocket inside a bend of the Avon, hot mineral springs come up out of the rock on their own, and there is nowhere else in the country where that happens. Every stone laid here since is a response to that. I have lain in a great many lanes. This is the only one that is warm from underneath.
Why then
When the first stone went down.
Barely a generation after the conquest, somebody official had noticed the water. Coins put people here at the very beginning of Roman Britain, perhaps under Claudius and near enough certainly under Nero, and there was a temple beside the spring dedicated to Sul Minerva: a local goddess with a Roman surname fastened onto her. The empire did not find this place. It roofed what was already here and wrote the name down.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 54-400
Rome. Coins put people here at the very beginning of Roman Britain, perhaps under Claudius and near enough certainly under Nero, and they keep turning up until about the year 400. Beside the spring stood a temple to Sul Minerva, and the water was held to be good for gout, rheumatism and bad skin. So the empire's business on this spot was never the frontier. It was the cure.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
- 676-1088
A monastery. On 6 November 676 Osric, under-king of the Hwicce, gave the abbess Bertana a hundred manentes of land next to the city of Bath so that a house of holy virgins could be raised on it, and for four hundred years the church held this ground. Its one enormous day came on Whit Sunday, 11 May 973, when the archbishops Dunstan and Oswald took part in the crowning of King Edgar. Then everybody went home and the place went back to being small.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
- 1088-1539
The bishop, who was also the landlord. In 1088 William Rufus gave the bishopric to John de Villula, a physician from Tours, and then handed him the abbey of Bath and everything it owned to top up the income of the post. The seat moved here from Wells, and the man in the church became the man who ran the town. That held until 27 January 1539, when two of the king's commissioners came to take the surrender of the priory and a foundation nearly a thousand years old stopped existing.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
- 1590-
The citizens, eventually. A charter of 7 December 1189 started the process of self-government, and finishing it took four hundred years: on 4 September 1590 Elizabeth granted the charter that made Bath a sole city of itself, with a mayor, aldermen and a common council, markets on Wednesday and Saturday, and its own courts. It has been tidied up since. In 1974 a charter had to be issued re-conferring on the borough of Bath the status of a city, which strikes me as an excellent use of paper.
Sources: mayorofbath.co.uk
The emblem
What the shield means.
This is not the shield. Bath's arms carry the borough wall, the mineral springs and the river Avon, which is a great deal of information for something you have to recognise at the size of a thumbnail. So the icon shows a piece of ceiling instead. Bishop Oliver King ordered the abbey rebuilt in 1499, and Henry VII's masons, the brothers Robert and William Vertue, put a fan vault over it: one stem to a bay, opening into a fan overhead. It is reckoned among the finest in the country, and it is the only ceiling I have ever wanted to bite.
Sources: mayorofbath.co.uk, www.bathabbey.org
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The spring is not a historical site. It is still running. About 1,170,000 litres come up every day at 46 degrees, and they have kept it up under every owner this place has ever had. Everything else on this walk is something a person decided to put here. That is the one thing nobody decided.
Sources: www.romanbaths.co.uk
The shape you are walking is a ninth-century defence plan. Alfred's fortified towns all follow one pattern: a broad main street between the gates with the market on it, lanes running off that at fairly regular intervals, and a street circling the town so the men on the walls could be reached quickly. Bath still has an Upper Borough Walls and a Lower Borough Walls. The wall itself is mostly gone. The way round it is a street with dots on it.
Sources: www.buildinghistory.org
Then it burst out of the medieval walls in one long spurt of new building. John Wood the elder leased tracts of land outside them and set out the Parades and the Circus as speculative ventures, and the whole lot went up in a single material: the warm Bath stone out of Ralph Allen's quarries at Combe Down. That is why this place has exactly one colour. A city made the way a good loaf is made, one dough all the way through.
Sources: www.buildinghistory.org
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- gate
- The walled town had gates, and the streets that went out through them kept the names. Westgate Street and Westgate Buildings, Southgate Street and Southgate Place, Abbey Gate Street. The gates themselves are gone, so you walk through nothing at all, which I regard as a missed course.
- Borough Walls
- Upper Borough Walls and Lower Borough Walls are not walls. They are the streets that ran along them. Walk both and look at what they used to enclose, and you will see how little of this city is old and how much of it is new.
- Parade
- North Parade, South Parade, Saint James's Parade, Kingston Parade, Riverside Parade. A parade was laid out to be walked up and down for no reason except the walking. Somebody here understood me two hundred years before I was hungry.
- Buildings
- Barton Buildings, Chandos Buildings, Miles's Buildings, Kingston Buildings, Westgate Buildings. A terrace went up as one piece of work and got named as one piece of work, so here a street can be called Buildings, plural and everything.
- Mews
- Lansdown Mews, Palace Yard Mews. The service lane behind the grand address, where the horses lived and the deliveries came. Plain, narrow, well worn. Best surface on the level.
- New / Old
- New Bond Street and Old Bond Street. New King Street and Old King Street. New Orchard Street, Old Orchard Street and, separately, Old Orchard. This place builds a new one, keeps the old one, and then refuses to rename either of them for the next two centuries.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 112streets
- 854dots
- 12.9km of street
- 17.5km on foot
- 5.0hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.