Our journey would end in a few days, but not before two more blockbuster stops: Stonehenge and Bath.
🗿 No Visit to England Is Complete Without Stonehenge
From Oxford we headed southwest across Salisbury Plain. I had been to Stonehenge once before, briefly, at the end of our Land of the Midnight Sun cruise on Viking, squeezed in around a few days in London before flying home. Bob did not get to come along that time, and I had barely an hour on the ground. This visit I wanted to slow down and actually understand the place.
We arrived around 10:30 with a little over an hour to see the visitor center and take the shuttle out to the stone circle. André had us all download the Stonehenge app before we got off the bus, so we could listen to the audio guide as we walked. Numbered markers around the site correspond to specific narratives, and you move at your own pace.
There were a lot of people, as always, but the site is spread across enough open ground that it never felt crowded. We could walk the full circuit, take our time with photos, and listen without anyone hurrying us along.
What we now know about the stones
Archaeologists have learned a great deal in just the past few years, and the story has gotten stranger rather than simpler.
Building began about five thousand years ago and continued in phases for roughly fifteen centuries. There are two kinds of stone here, and they could not be more different. The sarsens are the giants, the thirty-ton uprights and lintels that form the outer ring and the inner horseshoe, and they came from West Woods near Marlborough, about fifteen miles away. Moving those without wheels or draft animals is difficult to imagine even standing in front of them.
The smaller blue stones are the ones that rewrite the story. They weigh one to three tons apiece and most came from the Preseli Hills in west Wales, more than 140 miles away. They are thought to be the first stones raised on the site. Then there is the Altar Stone, the six-ton slab lying flat at the very center. For a hundred years everyone assumed it came from Wales too. In 2024 a team analyzing the age and chemistry of its mineral grains matched it instead to the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland, more than 400 miles away, possibly brought by sea. Nobody knows how. Nobody knows exactly when.
That single finding means every stone at Stonehenge was hauled here from somewhere else, and researchers have since argued the monument may have been built as a unifying project, drawing people and materials from across Neolithic Britain to one spot on Salisbury Plain. Whatever it meant to the people who raised it, it was not a local undertaking.
The sky was clear blue and the wind blew hard the whole time we were out there, which only added to the drama of the place and the sense of standing somewhere genuinely strange.
Our time was running short, so Bob, a few others, and I headed back to the shuttle and the visitor center, where I picked up a few things for the grand kids. I am hoping it plants an idea for someday.
🐑 Bath, the Gateway to the Cotswolds
The Cotswolds is a stretch of southwest England known for lush rolling hills, historic market towns, and honey colored limestone. Its medieval wealth came from wool, specifically the Cotswold Lion, a large long-fleeced sheep whose wool was prized across medieval Europe and paid for many of the grand churches you still see in the villages there. The Cotswold Way, a 164 kilometer National Trail, runs the length of the escarpment from Chipping Campden and finishes at the doors of Bath Abbey.
Driving in, the change in landscape and architecture was immediate. The hills steepen, and every building is faced in the same warm Bath limestone. The effect is oddly uniform after Oxford. Where Oxford is a medieval jumble of styles layered over centuries, Bath is overwhelmingly Georgian and built to a plan, which makes it read as newer and more orderly even though plenty of it is older than it looks.
We had a packed two days ahead and wasted no time. We pulled up at the Hotel Indigo on South Parade, across from St John’s Church, and did not even get to drop our bags properly. A guide was already waiting in the lobby for the first of two tours.
🍰 High Tea at the Pump Room
Bath was the party town of Georgian England. Think Las Vegas of the eighteenth century: you came to escape London, take the waters, be seen, and work your way through a calendar of balls and assemblies. Bridgerton leaned into exactly that, and Bath is one of the series’ main filming locations, along with London, Windsor, and a handful of great houses. Our visit happened to coincide with the annual Jane Austen Festival, when the city fills with visitors in Regency dress promenading through the streets and attending period events. Seeing bonnets and tailcoats at a crosswalk never quite stopped being funny.
After walking through the Old Town and past Bath Abbey, we arrived at the Pump Room for a full high tea, complete with a string quartet playing through the afternoon. Watching over the whole thing from the east end of the room is a marble statue of Richard “Beau” Nash, the man they called the King of Bath.
Nash is worth knowing about. He arrived in 1705 as a failed lawyer, failed army officer, and dedicated gambler, and effectively invented the job of Master of Ceremonies. He banned dueling and the wearing of swords in the city, posted a set of written rules of conduct in this very room, pushed the corporation into paving, lighting, and cleaning the streets, and regulated the sedan chair men. He ran Bath’s social life until his death in 1761. The city’s Georgian golden age is largely his doing.
Around us were people in full period costume, others in modern afternoon tea attire, and a few in jeans. The staff were in formal uniform. It was all very civilized and a great deal of fun.
🏺 The Roman Baths
We left high tea thoroughly stuffed and walked down to the hot springs and the Roman Baths themselves.
The spring here was sacred long before the Romans arrived. The local Celtic people associated it with a goddess named Sulis. When the Romans came, rather than stamping the shrine out, they folded it into their own religion, identifying Sulis with Minerva and naming the settlement Aquae Sulis, the waters of Sulis. A temple went up around 60 to 70 AD and the bathing complex grew alongside it over the next three centuries into one of the great spa destinations of the Roman world, drawing pilgrims from across the empire.
The Romans were captivated by the springs, which fit both their daily bathing rituals and their belief that the water could heal. They built an elaborate complex with pools, steam rooms, changing rooms, and cold plunges, all of it as much a place to socialize and do business as to get clean. More than a million liters of water still rise here every day at 46 degrees Celsius.
My favorite detail from the museum was the curse tablets. About 130 thin sheets of lead and pewter were recovered from the Sacred Spring, each one scratched with a message to Sulis Minerva asking her to punish somebody. A striking number of them concern clothing stolen from bathers while they were in the water. Two thousand years later, the complaint is that someone took your stuff at the pool. They are among the earliest recorded prayers in Britain and are now on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
The tour took well over an hour and the audio guide is excellent. There are coins, sculpture, digital reconstructions, and costumed interpreters, and the whole thing builds a surprisingly vivid picture of daily life in Roman Britain. They even had the equivalent of a gym.
🧖 An Afternoon at Thermae Bath Spa
You cannot bathe in the Roman Baths, but you can still get into the same water. Thermae Bath Spa, a few minutes away, is Britain’s only natural thermal spa, built around the historic Hetling Pump Room and Hot Bath with a modern building called the New Royal Bath at its heart. One of the other tour guests and I decided we were not going to be in Bath and skip it.
The main draw is the open-air rooftop pool, thermal water at about 35 degrees Celsius with the city skyline laid out around you. Downstairs is the Minerva Bath, a large curved pool on the ground floor with massage jets and a slow circular current, and above that a Wellness Suite with aroma steam rooms, an infrared room, and an ice chamber. There is a cafe, treatment rooms, and proper locker and shower facilities. After a day of walking it was exactly right.
We ate on our own that first night. Bob and I kept it simple with a quiet meal at a Thai restaurant just down the road from the hotel. I was worn out and Bob still was not feeling great, so we turned in early.
📐 Day Two: The First Planned City in England
Our walking tour began at 9:30 the next morning. Our guide was a former college professor who had lived in Bath for decades and knew it inside out, and like every guide on this trip he was excellent.
We started at the Abbey, pausing to take in several unusual features of the west front before moving on. From there the tour became a lesson in city planning.
Georgian Bath was essentially designed by a father and son, both named John Wood. John Wood the Elder laid out Queen Square in the 1720s and then began the Circus, a ring of thirty-three houses stacked with Roman Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns, modeled loosely on a Roman amphitheater turned inside out. He died in 1754, the year he broke ground on it. His son, John Wood the Younger, finished the Circus, then connected it by Brock Street to the Royal Crescent, thirty houses in one sweeping arc built between 1767 and 1775, plus the Assembly Rooms and the Hot Bath.
The reason for all of it was money. Bath needed upscale housing for the aristocracy and the hangers-on of the Court who followed royalty down from London to the country estates around the city. The Woods built the supply. One detail our guide pointed out that I would never have noticed: on the Royal Crescent, every downpipe draining that enormous roof is hidden inside the walls, because nothing was allowed to interrupt the facade.
Jane Austen, who did not love it here
Austen lived in Bath from 1801 to 1806, after her father retired and moved the family here, and the popular version of the story needs a correction. She did not write her novels in Bath. She was unhappy for most of her time here, started a novel called The Watsons and abandoned it, and produced very little else. Her productive years came later, at Chawton in Hampshire, where she wrote Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.
What Bath did give her was material. Two of her six novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, are set substantially in the city, and all six mention it. The shallowness and social climbing she watched here fed directly into her sharpest writing. After she left she wrote to her sister Cassandra about the happy feelings of escape. The city that she could not wait to leave now runs a festival in her honor every September, which she would have found very funny.
Bath in the Blitz
Bath did not escape the war. Over a single weekend, 25 to 27 April 1942, the Luftwaffe hit the city in three raids. These were the Baedeker raids, so called because the targets were picked from a German tourist guide for their cultural value rather than any military purpose. A German propagandist reportedly promised to bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars.
417 people were killed and about a thousand injured. Nineteen thousand buildings were damaged, more than a thousand of them seriously, including houses in the Royal Crescent and the Circus. The Assembly Rooms were gutted, though the chandeliers had been moved to a mine for safekeeping only shortly before. Most of the city survived, and what did not was rebuilt after the war.
🍷 A Slow Dinner and a Good One
Our tour ended around 11:30 and I headed back to check on Bob before we went out for lunch. We ended up at a seafood restaurant near the historic market area, on a street lined with shops and places to eat. We walked a bit more afterward, then went back to the room to relax and get a little work done.
Dinner was hosted by Tauck at the restaurant in the Hotel Indigo. We all had separate reservations and it turned out the kitchen was short-staffed, so service was slow. The food more than made up for it. Bob had a Lobster Thermidor and I had a ribeye cooked exactly right.
🚌 Next Stop: Hampton Court and London
The next morning we would head for London, with a stop at Hampton Court Palace along the way. Two and a half days in the capital, and then home.
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