I walk there several times a week and enjoy watching the seasons pass. The Botanic Gardens are fantastic to visit in any season, with its ever-changing landscape of trees, flowers, fat pigeons and cheeky squirrels. If that’s true, it makes The Circus the heart of strange Bath, and it plays an important part in my story, Map of Shadows. There are over 500 carved emblems along the frieze of the columns, including serpents, stone tablets of the 10 commandments, lightning bolts, and more.Īccording to legend, a ley line connects Bath Abbey and The Circus, cutting along Brock Street. The layout of The Circus, Gay Street and Queen Square form a key, a common symbol in Freemasonry, representing power or hidden secrets. The outer circumference matches the ancient Druid standing stones, as well as incorporating the pagan circle and crescent of The Circus and The Royal Crescent just along the street.įreemasonry was used in the design. Inspired by Bath’s alleged druid past, architect John Wood the Elder designed the Circus by modelling its dimensions on Stonehenge. When I wrote Map of Shadows, which opens in Bath, I started to research the area and found it has an incredible background. I walk through The Circus almost every day, so it’s a place I have come to love. Five enormous plane trees stand in the central garden, blocking the view of the buildings and it’s really hard to get a picture of the curved facade. The Circus is a gorgeous, circular Georgian terrace with three layers of classical columns. (2) Druids, The Circus, and the Freemasons The Circus, Bath. It gives a whole new insight into the people frequenting the Roman Baths in their ancient heyday. Many of the tablets refer to small items stolen at the baths. The text asks her to persecute the guilty party until they return the stolen property. Some of them address Sulis Minerva as the guardian of the spring. The second group involves asking the gods to mete out justice against thieves and the Bath tablets fall into this category.
The Romans were asking the gods to take matters into their hands. These were ideal if you wanted to curse love rivals or sporting competitors. One group takes the form of binding curses. They turned out to be curse tablets rolled into tubes and dating back to the earliest centuries AD.Ĭurse tablets occur across the Greco-Roman world and they fall into two categories. It sounds idyllic, but excavations in the late 1970s revealed a darker side to the Romans in Bath.Īrchaeologists uncovered around 130 thin sheets of metal in the waters of the King’s Bath.
They built a temple to her and the resulting town became Aquae Sulis. They combined Sul with their own goddess, Minerva, to create Sul Minerva.
Dedicated to Sul, the goddess of healing, the spring’s popularity drew the Romans’ attention. In the pre-Roman era, a hot spring existed in the area frequented by the local pagan population. Ley lines crackle with mysterious power along the same streets used by tour buses, and under these streets lie curses to ancient gods. A strange Bath, a place haunted by Druids with Masonic symbols hidden in plain sight. Made famous by Jane Austen costume dramas, the city became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.īut beneath the charming streets, Roman baths, and Georgian grandeur lies a weird city. I’ve been living in Bath for several years now, and although on the surface, it seems like a genteel little place, there is a darker side to the city – if you know where to look.īath straddles the River Avon in Wiltshire in the South West of England.