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These are some ideas on what to do when you have visited enough attractions in Bath itself.
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- Canal narrow boat trips: Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons from Dundas Basin (01225) and Bradford–on-Avon (01225 868683). This is life at 3mph in the green and pleasant Limpley Stoke Valley,and the perfect antidote to relentless urban pace. Or hire an electric boat.
- Bowood House (www.bowood.org), east of Bath, or Stourhead (NT), south of Bath. Both stately homes have a lake, swans, a Greek temple, a grotto, splendid vistas, rhododendrons, acres of parkland – all the amenities that the ‘haves’ in the eighteenth century required to make their way of life agreeable. An adventure playground at Bowood makes it a mecca for the under-12s.
- Lacock Abbey (NT) is no longer an abbey: Not since the 1530s when that royal vandal-in-chief, Henry VIII, ‘dissolved’ the monasteries, including most of this abbey. A lovely mellow Tudor building that encompasses the original cloister and there is an interesting stable courtyard with dairy, cider press, brewery and bakery. One of the Harry Potters was filmed here, making it a mecca for the over-12s as well.
- The White Horse (Cherhill) and Avebury Stone Circles and Silbury Hill. The horse, Stubbsian in style, cut in the chalk hillside in 1780, is 129 feet long and 142 feet high and looks perfectly proportioned from the road below. There is no need even to get out of your car because you can marvel at it from a lay-by on the A4. Silbury is said to be the largest man-made hill in Europe.
- Close Cotswold villages. Castle Combe, a village busy with tourists, Biddestone, where people live, and not much frequented, and Lacock, a perfect Cotswold village.
- Stonehenge is worth 7-minute of your time. Unless you are an astronomer or archaeologist or druid, the average mortal can take in the sweep and emptiness of the place and the immensity of the stones (as high as a Victorian drawing room), and wonder how our ancestors positioned them without access to a JCB or Caterpillar. Has television made us lose our sense of awe? Like the City of Bath, Stonehenge is a Unesco World Heritage Site.
- The Bridge Tea Rooms c.1675. Bradford-on-Avon is worth visiting for the tea rooms alone. Generous portions of home-made cake served by ladies in voluminous Victorian frocks with pinafores. Not for the lactose-intolerant. Situated by the river and facing a stupendously ugly derelict building the other side of the medieval stone bridge. By the canal, there is a vast Tithe Barn, a measure of the wealth of the Church at one time; there is also a rare Anglo-Saxon stone church, the other side of the river. Walkable from Bath along the canal tow path.
- Castles. To the west of Bath, Chepstow, stands on a bluff above the river Wye, is massive and a measure of the ‘law and order’ problem that once existed on this Wales-England frontier; Berkeley is old, added to over the centuries and lived in. To the south, Nunney is a very small castle, grassy, the interior open to the skies, the outer wall intact and surrounded by a peaceful moat with gliding swans; Farley Hungerford is a lesser Chepstow overlooking the river Frome. Some unremarkable frescoes in the chapel. Returned to the original family in the 1990s.
- Cathedrals: Salisbury is pointed with the tallest spire in Hampshire and emphasises the Vertical and Wells emphasises the Horizontal. Two quite different styles of cathedral. Binoculars are an asset in looking at the statuary on the west front of Wells.
- Bristol made its money from the slave trade and is the largest conurbation to Bath (12 miles). Clifton Suspension Bridge spans the Avon Gorge. Impressive lit up at night. The Old Harbour is a tourist area.
- London. An Apex fare. A matinee performance. A quick in and out of the capital and savour the sweet air of Bath on your return.
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