The Sacred Spring at Bath

Aquae Sulis

The Romans arrived in the first century AD, found the local goddess Sulis already attached to the spring, and did what they usually did: they identified her with one of their own. The result was Sulis Minerva, and the town took the name Aquae Sulis — the waters of Sulis.

Around the spring they built a temple and a bathing complex. The spring itself was enclosed, so that the water people saw was framed, dark and clearly the property of a god. That framing is the whole point. A pool you can walk into is a pool. A pool you can only look into is a threshold.

Twelve thousand coins

Excavation of the spring recovered more than twelve thousand Roman coins, spanning the entire period of Roman Britain, along with jewellery, gemstones, plate and objects of silver and pewter. Nobody dropped that many by accident.

The pattern is consistent across the Roman and Celtic world — Coventina's Well on Hadrian's Wall produced a comparable hoard — and it tells us the gesture was ordinary. Not the act of a pilgrim on a special day, but something a person did on the way past, the way you might now.

The curse tablets

Alongside the coins came around a hundred and thirty small sheets of lead and pewter, scratched with writing and folded. They are not wishes in the modern sense. They are complaints.

Most concern theft. Someone's cloak has gone missing from the baths, or their gloves, or six silver coins, and the writer asks Sulis to deal with the culprit — often in terms that leave nothing to the imagination, and often without naming a suspect, leaving the goddess to work it out. One asks that the thief lose their mind and their eyes in the goddess's temple.

They are among the only surviving examples of everyday written British Latin, and in 2014 they were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register. They also make an uncomfortable point about what people actually ask for when they think a god is listening: not peace, mostly. Their cloak back.

What it tells us about the coin in your hand

Three things carry directly from Bath to a fountain in Rome today. The offering is metal, because metal is valuable and permanent. It is given to water that is enclosed and unreachable, so it cannot be taken back. And it is accompanied by a request that the giver does not expect to negotiate.

The modern wish has lost the goddess and kept the structure. That is a smaller change than it sounds.

If you go

The Roman Baths are a museum, and the spring, the temple courtyard and the great bath can all be seen. The water is not safe to touch and the pools are not for bathing — the modern spa nearby is fed from the same source and is where you go if you want to get in.

Do not throw coins into the Roman pools. This is the one wishing site in the world where the archaeology is the point, and adding to it is not homage, it is contamination.

Questions people ask

Is Bath the oldest wishing well?

It is the best documented early one rather than provably the oldest. Offerings to springs, rivers and bogs are found across prehistoric Europe; Bath is where the practice was preserved in enough quantity, and with enough writing, to be read.

What is a curse tablet?

A thin sheet of lead or pewter, scratched with a message to a god and thrown into the sacred water. At Bath most ask the goddess to punish a thief and recover stolen property.

Keep reading

• Glastonbury, England

  Chalice Well, Glastonbury

  A spring that runs red with iron and has never been known to fail. Here you leave a ribbon or a word, not a coin.

• Prague, Czechia

  St John of Nepomuk, Charles Bridge

  Prague's wishing ritual costs nothing and involves no water. You put your hand on a bronze relief worn gold by millions of others.

• Barcelona, Spain

  Font de Canaletes, Barcelona

  A small iron fountain at the top of La Rambla with one rule: drink from it and you will return to Barcelona.