This morning Ethan and I both had our separate plans: Ethan was headed to the abbey for Mass and I was going to be busy finally doing my laundry. However, when our hotel owner heard my plans for the morning, he insisted that I borrow their laundry machine. I can't describe how thankful I was. I haven't had clean clothes in such a long time.
Ethan had already headed to church and there was no chance I could catch up or make it to the service. I decided to wander around Bath while I waited for Ethan. As I was coming to Pulteney Bridge, I noticed a fake window painted on one of the buildings. It's below a faded advertisement for a bookstore. I liked the artificial view of a man enjoying his books as part of the ad.
I found a staircase down to the river walk along the Avon. The path gave beautiful views of the weir. If any have seen the 2012 film version of Les Miserables, the weir makes an appearance in the scene of Javert's death.
The Pulteney Bridge was inspired by the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy. I immediately noticed the similarities and think both are beautiful for different reasons. The Ponte Vecchio looks a bit more haphazard but has amazing history and beautiful stores. The Pulteney Bridge has a more random collection of shops, but the facade is well designed and gorgeous. Both fantastic bridges!
Just off the river walk is a small meditation maze. The maze was put in during the 1970s and has beautiful mosaic work in the center. The main image is of the "Gorgon" from the Roman temple complex (neither Ethan nor I think it is depicting a Gorgon; it seems more like the depiction of a river deity). Running through the image is a golden thread (they call it Ariadne's thread, referencing the thread the Cretan princess gave to Theseus to help fight the minotaur), which adds a second maze...for your eyes! The images surrounding the central portrait are from Roman myth, including the Orpheus and Proserpina.
I headed back over the river and waited for service to end in the abbey. As I stood outside the building, I noticed many details I hadn't seen before. There were scrolls on the towers, a flock of angels surrounding a saint, and two depictions of Jacob's ladder. They run up each tower, showing angels climbing up to heaven.
Once Ethan came out of service, we decided to head out of the city center and head to the Prior Park Landscape Garden. The park was about a mile outside of the city center and up a pretty large hill. We weren't sure what we were headed to see and were a bit disappointed that we had to pay to enter, but after the walk, we weren't turning back empty-handed.
Prior Park was the estate of a wealthy local businessman, Ralph Allen, in the 18th century. He had mad a great deal of money reforming the British postal system and then again in quarrying the local Bath stone. He decided to build a beautiful, Palladian manor house as an advertisement for the wonders of Bath stone. Now the manor house is a private school.
The house sits at the top of a small valley looking over the city of Bath. The center of the valley is empty of trees, creating a grassy field down towards the most notable feature of the landscape garden, the Palladian bridge. The rest of the park is covered with trees, a mixture of mostly elms, oaks, and various evergreens.
We made our way down the valley and to the Palladian bridge. This bridge, a copy of the Palladian bridge at Wilton House in Wiltshire, is one of four surviving Palladian bridges in the world. Three of the bridges are in the United Kingdom and one is in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The bridge was built in the 1750s and soon attracted vandals. The first piece of graffiti on the bridge dates from 1799, although Ethan and I did not find it. The earliest carving we found was from 1809. Though I can't and won't condone this sort of damage to beautiful architecture, it is interesting how graffiti becomes a little piece of history. This is constantly relevant in the study of classics (i.e. the graffiti found in cities like Pompeii). I'm not sure what we can read into the graffiti found on the bridge, but there may be something there. It was interesting even just to see how much more detailed and more deeply carved the older inscriptions were. They looked like they had been chiseled in.
Fun Fact #23: Ralph Allen had a pretty prolific career in the 18th century. At the age of 19 he was named Postmaster General of Bath. Thirty years later, he became the mayor of Bath. He then served as a representative in Parliament for Bath. He also helped put Bath on the map with his quarrying of Bath stone, the stone that came to define the city. This honey colored rock is found in Prior Park, Bath Abbey, The Circus, the Royal Crescent, and many other beautiful buildings in Bath.
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