Bath

Do not put a hand in the water or drink it. The Roman bath survives intact, but the pipes are lead and the water has stood open since the plumbing failed, so bacteria live in it. The Great Bath is green because nothing roofs it and algae grow.

Angels climb ladders across the west front, and two of them are coming down head first. Memorial slabs cover floor and walls so thickly that a step without one is hard to find. Tower tours go up in fixed groups because the stair is narrow.

Thirty terraced houses curve above a lawn. The fronts match down to the spacing of the columns, but each owner built his own back, so the windows differ. Only the house at one end opens inside; the rest are lived in or run as a hotel.

The circle is cut into three arcs, so whichever entrance you use a facade stands in front of you. Acorn finials along the parapet come from the legend of the town's founding, and the plane trees in the middle arrived later, where a water tank once stood.

Shops line both sides, so crossing the top you never notice it is a bridge, and only from the riverbank do the three curved steps of the weir show.

The Roman bath is closed to bathers; this is where you get into the same spring water. The rooftop pool has no cover, so it runs in rain, and the steam rises harder then. Towel and robe come with the session, but bring your own swimsuit.

A garden looking down a valley, with a roofed Palladian bridge across the bottom of it. There is no car park, so you walk up or take a bus, and the hill makes the return harder than the way in.

The railway station shut in 1966, and the iron roof and platforms are still standing. A market runs underneath it now with produce stalls on Saturdays, and the cover overhead keeps trading going through rain.

A six-mile loop over the hills that ring the town. It crosses meadow and wood with the city below from several angles, and there is no shop on the way, so carry water. Cattle graze parts of it, so shut the gates behind you.

This is where the Kennet and Avon canal drops into the city. The locks are stacked in a flight like steps. A boat takes about ninety minutes to work through, and you can stand and watch. The towpath is level enough to cycle, but it narrows at each lock.

Austen lived in Bath for some years from 1801 and set 2 novels here. A Georgian house on Gay Street tells the story through period dress and letters. A costumed guide waits on the doorstep; the upstairs tea room draws its own crowd.

Silver and portraits fill a former hotel at the end of Great Pulteney Street. In 2011 an extension clad in glass and ceramic was added at the back. It played Lady Danbury's house in the series Bridgerton.

William Herschel, then a musician, found Uranus from this back garden in 1781 with a telescope of his own making. The workshop where he and his sister Caroline ground mirrors survives. It is a small terraced house and quick to see.

Pleasure gardens opened in 1795, now a public park. The Kennet and Avon Canal and Brunel's railway both cut through the middle, crossed by cast-iron bridges. Austen wrote in her letters of walking here.

30 minutes by road east of Bath, the whole village is in National Trust hands, so wires and signs are scarce. In its abbey Fox Talbot made the oldest surviving photographic negative around 1835. The abbey cloisters turn up as Hogwarts corridors on screen.

A brookside village where the Cotswolds end in the south, north of Bath, its stone cottages round a 14th century market cross. With no parking inside, leave the car up the hill and walk down. Everyone photographs it from the little bridge.

The stone circle on Salisbury Plain, roughly 60 minutes by car from Bath. A shuttle runs some 2km from the visitor centre to the stones, which are normally seen from behind a rope. At the summer solstice dawn people are let in among them.