5/14 – 5/16/22
5-14
About a month ago, presuming on the strength of a Facebook friendship, I emailed a fellow Rome enthusiast with a large following on Twitter to ask whether he would be interested in meeting somewhere near his home in Swindon. In his response, he had very generously offered to host me for a day and guide me around the Roman sites of South Wales and the Cotswolds. I had been delighted to accept.
So I spent a very pleasant day talking shop at a series of Roman ruins. In many ways, the first two – Caerwent and Caerleon, both in south Wales – were the most impressive. The Roman walls of Caerleon are among the best-preserved in northern Europe, and Caerleon’s amphitheater still looks much as it did when the legionaries gathered to watch fights there.
Of the afternoon’s sites – Great Witcombe Villa, Chedworth Villa, and the Cirencester museum – the highlight was probably Great Witcombe. Though the villa itself is poorly preserved, its site – a hillside overlooking the groves and fields of the Cotswolds – remains superb.
Then, after a pleasant dinner in Cirencester, I returned to Swindon station for a train to Oxford. When I made my bookings a month ago, the only reasonably priced accommodation I could find in central Oxford was a bunk in the sort of hostel I am at least a decade too old to find appealing. To make matters worse, I discovered that my hostel was directly across the street from Oxford’s busiest club. A long night.
5-15
Like most college towns, Oxford is very quiet on Sunday mornings. I had the streets virtually to myself as I strolled, peering through the gates of ancient quads. Although a bank of dark clouds on the horizon threatened rain, the weather was pleasant.
Perhaps because the streets were so quiet, Oxford seemed even more idyllic than Cambridge. The old city center was certainly more architecturally impressive, with its ancient church towers and the neoclassical majesty of Radcliffe Square. After a lengthy circuit of the colleges and a walk along the River Cherwell, I made my way to the Ashmolean Museum, and spent a pleasant hour there.
It had begun to rain by the time I emerged from the museum, and poured all through the bus ride to Blenheim Palace. Doing my best to shelter beneath a thoroughly inadequate umbrella, I splashed down the long tree-lined walk to the palace. The cavernous interior, with its soaring ceilings and marble halls, was a pleasure to explore.
Returning to Oxford, I visited the Pitt Rivers Museum, a vast Victorian collection of anthropological bric-a-brac. It was love at first sight: row after row of dusty cases crammed with every conceivable class of object, from evil eye amulets to opium pipes. I wandered among them, fascinated, until a few minutes before the museum closed, exiting by way of an equally archaic and wonderful geological collection.
5-16
Bath is a graceful city. Thanks to its glamorous career as the resort of choice for the Georgian aristocracy, the whole downtown is a neoclassical symphony of townhouses and shops, sweeping from the sculpted cascades of the river to the Abbey’s slender spires.
I began, naturally, with the Roman Baths, built nearly two millennia ago over Britain’s only hot spring. Victorian excavators cleared and restored the main pool of the Roman building, still filled with opaque spring water. The modern museum is well-presented – they make a nice attempt to re-create the lives of the Romans who used the baths – and ends with a chance to drink the fabled Bath water. I did, and can’t recommend the exercise.
I spent a few hours exploring Bath, peering at tombs in the Abbey, walking along the terraces and circles of eighteenth-century mansions, and lingering over a pizza. Then, a long series of trains to Liverpool, where I stayed in a budget hotel perched on top of a karaoke bar.