A day in Bath, the Cotswolds and Stonehenge

A Day in Bath, the Cotswolds and Stonehenge

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It sounded too good to be true: Bath, the Cotswolds, and Stonehenge all in one day. With time always a precious commodity during travel, the City Wonders tour covering all three caught my eye while I was doing my research and I couldn’t get it out of my mind, even though I’m normally one of those people who “don’t do tours.” I had already figured out a DIY Stonehenge itinerary, but it would have taken nearly all day, and I was finding it challenging to explore the Cotswolds without a car. Bath was intriguing and everyone had told me I should check it out, but even advance train tickets weren’t cheap and I had already half made up my mind to skip it. The chance to see all three, therefore, was something that I just couldn’t pass up.
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Check-in time was naturally early — 7:15 AM just outside the Gloucester Road tube station — but we had a chance to catch up on sleep on the journey to Bath. I have to admit that’s one thing about tours that I could get used to: an opportunity to leave all the planning and staying alert to the guide, just relaxing and allowing myself to be shepherded along the trail. Another plus: my feet were getting much-needed rest after two full days pounding the pavements of London with shoes that didn’t fit me very well. At lunch later on, a retiree from Minnesota revealed that those were the very reasons she had chosen to take the tour in the middle of her week in London — as a strategic break between days and days of walking and exploring all by herself.
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Bath

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We arrived in sunny Bath at 10 in the morning. The entire city is a UNESCO Heritage Site and even at first glance it wasn’t hard to see why. Beautiful buildings, most of them built in the distinctive honey-colored Bath stone, surrounded us from the time we got off the bus at the Circus, through the impressive Royal Crescent, and down to Bath Abbey and the center of town. Georgia, our guide, plied us along the way with tales of Beau Nash, Bath society, and husband-snaring with a handkerchief.
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As rich and glorious as Bath’s past was, its present is none too shabby either. After the tour, we had an hour to wander Bath by ourselves and found little gems of life, such as seniors playing petanque in a park. And I think that’s what I liked most about Bath: it’s a city that mindfully preserves its past but also allows itself to be lived in; a place that people actually call home, with all that word entails.
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The Cotswolds

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Our second stop was the Cotswolds village of Castle Combe. It was just after midday when we got there — the tour was inclusive of lunch at The White Hart pub — and it seemed all the residents had gone off to work so we had the picture-perfect place to ourselves. (Incidentally, I learned that Castle Combe was one of the filming locations for one of my favorite films, Stardust. I never got to see Mark Strong in London but this is almost as good, yeah?)
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The nearby village of Lacock was just as pretty and with more signs of life: a man cleaning his windows, a mother shepherding her kids, the last of the schoolchildren cheerfully heading home.
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Finally, best for last:

Stonehenge
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If you’ve read my previous post on Stonehenge, you’ll know I was kind of ambivalent about it. A lot of people had gone and seen it and come away underwhelmed — just a bunch of stones, they said. But now that I’ve been there myself, I am totally on the side of “yes, absolutely, go see it if you can.” Georgia’s comprehensive explanation left me in awe of how people thousands of years ago, without any of today’s tools, were able to assemble such gigantic structures that had come from as far away as Wales. But even without that back-story — even without the how — the equivocal why is enough to give one a sense of wonder. You look up at those stones and you think: why would anyone go to such enormous bother to build Stonehenge? Why was it so important to them? It’s amazing, when you think about it.
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One thing that people sometimes complain about Stonehenge is that you can’t get close to it. Actually, there’s a path that goes around Stonehenge, and some parts of it are a bit far from the stones, but there are also parts of it that go quite near. This is an unzoomed photo that was only cropped just a teeny tiny bit on the right to remove a few distant photobombers, so you see you can get quite close:
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We had great luck with the weather the entire day and my favorite part was when the sun peeked out of a few clouds and cast visible rays on the area.
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One last quick note about the tour itself: the meeting point was convenient, Georgia took the time to really speak to us individually, they were able to accommodate such requests as a bit more time for taking photos at Castle Combe while still getting us back to London half an hour ahead of schedule, and basically everything went off without a hitch, so I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend City Wonders.