DAVE BRAUND-PHILLIPS: Bath’s Romans Baths

Last weekend Jess and I went to the Roman Bath in Bath City, north Somerset. It was a brilliant display of Roman engineering. I thought I would share with you a snippet of their industrial technology and a few of my own pictures.

The Roman Baths are below the modern street level and have four main features: the sacred spring, the Roman temple, the Roman bath house and finds from Roman Bath.

The sacred spring lies at the very heart of the ancient monument. Water rises here at the rate of over a million litres a day and at a temperature of 460C. The spring rises within the courtyard of the temple of Sulis Minerva and water from it feeds the Roman baths. There is some slight evidence - an earthen bank projecting into the spring - that suggests it was already a focal point for worship before the Roman temple and baths were built.

Roman engineers surrounded the spring with an irregular stone chamber lined with lead. To provide a stable foundation for this they drove oak piles into the mud. At first this reservoir formed an open pool in a corner of the temple courtyard but in the second century AD it was enclosed within a barrel vaulted building and columns and statue bases were placed in the spring itself. Enclosing the spring in a dimly lit building in this way and erecting statues and columns within it must have enhanced the aura of mystery that surrounded it. Offerings were thrown into the spring throughout the Roman period.

Eventually the vaulted building collapsed into the spring itself. We do not know when this was but it is likely to have been in the sixth or seventh century. The oak piles sunk into the mud two thousand years ago continue to provide a stable foundation for the Roman reservoir walls today.

The Roman plumbing and drainage system is still largely in place and shows the ingenuity of the Roman engineers. Lead pipes were used to carry hot spa water around the site using gravity flow. The spring overflow is where surplus water from the spring, not used in the baths, flows out to a Roman drain.The Roman great drain carries all the spa water from the site to the River Avon four hundred metres away.