Category Archives: racing

Welcome to Bath – UNESCO World Heritage Site‘ – reads the roadsign, rather incongruously greeting the weary traveller at this dull spot between the railway line and the Texaco garage. Four miles have gone by in the lashing rain and there are another nine to go in the Bath Half Marathon.

Bath is famous for its hot springs, and there is no doubt at all that the aquifer is being fully recharged in the foggy hills around the town. The goddess Minerva presided over the Roman baths built here, and the weather she’s organised is extracting a bitter revenge on the runners gathered for the race. Even the glorious pale gold of the Bath stone mansions in Great Pultney Street had looked a bit drab as we’d shivered back at the start line, waiting for a delay just long enough for the rain to arrive.

All that Georgian architecture is far behind us here, and a third of the race is already run. Continue reading →

It’s a breezy day in Portsmouth, with a stiff breeze whipping up shingle beach. The Isle of Wight ferries are plying to and fro across the marble grey water of the Solent, as I shiver wind-propelled along the promenade towards the pier.

There’s a simple D-Day memorial just by Southsea’s boating pond, and I cross the road to read it. From this very beach, it says, a multi-national force embarked on the 6th June, 1944 on their great adventure to liberate Europe.
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It was the Celts who discovered the hot springs of Bath, around 500 BC, worshipping their goddess Sul here. From 43 AD, the Roman city of Aquae Sulis – the waters of Sul – developed around the site.

Bath was built as a town for recreation, not a garrison, a kind of ancient Las Vegas, and the impressive baths today form some of the best Roman remains in Europe.

In more recent ages, Samuel Pepys, Queen Anne, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, David Garrick, Thomas Gainsborough, William Wordsworth, Josiah Wedgwood, William Pitt and Dr David Livingstone all visited at one time or another.
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