Today we enjoyed a car ride to two hamlets near Bath, England. We saw a beautiful old church, a 700 year-old abbey, and both were used in creating important movies: War Horse and Harry Potter. Then, this evening we took a bath in Bath!
In the morning, our first visit was to Castle Combe, a small town that was used to film many of the villages scenes for the movie Warhorse, Wolf Man, and Dr. Doolittle.
The building of the 80 foot church tower, in the background of this pic, began in 1434. The baptismal font inside is dated to 1450, and the congregation goes back a century earlier with the first named rector in 1301.
Then we drove 15 minutes to Lacock Village to see their famous abbey, built in the 1300s. It is impressive to walk these same halls, 850 years later, where these Norman nuns once kept silent retreat, praying for the world. That is, until King Henry 8th abolished all catholic ties and ordered Norman churches destroyed and abbeys outlawed. This abbey structure remained however, and served different purposes.
Look hard, and you can imagines scenes of Harry Potter films in these photos. This cauldron has been dated back to the late 1300s, to the time of the nuns using this abbey.
In recent years, the city of Bath created a four story building to house the new Thermae Bath Spa, filled with natural water from the same hot springs built up by the Romans 2,000 years ago. So Sue and I decided a trip here would not be complete without taking a bath in Bath. We went for the twilight package. The rooftop pool is amazing in direct sunlight, complete with bubbles on one side, and it holds about 50 people comfortably. The 3rd floor, below the pool, has four steam rooms, each with a different temperature, and each infused with an aromatic essence – eucalyptus, saddle wood, lemonwood/ginger and lavender, and every one of the four holds about 12 people. This floor also has warm and cold showers. Other floors had changing rooms, a cafe, showers, bathrooms and a spa massage center. We learned on our history walk that the hot springs water flows at a consistent rate since it comes from so deep in the earth. They have traced the water isotopes to nearby hills, and estimate that it takes 4,000 years for the rain on the hills to come out of this hot spring. It is amazing that we can now enjoy the same hot baths that the Romans and Celtics did, 2,000 years later. It added an exclamation point to our trip to Bath, England, and the Cotswolds!