Basic HTML Version
38
Historic Gardens 2010
BCD Special Report
However, cold baths were not only viewed
as a method of curing disease. Throughout
the century there was a renewed interest in
following a regimen to achieve good health.
According to Virginia Smith, ‘between 1700
and 1770 the medical advice book market
expanded intermittently but steadily’.
2
The
books often described modes of healthy
living that, the authors claimed, would extend
life expectancy. One of the many types of
routine advocated was the cold regimen,
which included spending time out of doors,
eating cooling foods, taking plenty of exercise
and bathing in cold water. One of the great
advocates of this regime was the philosopher
John Locke. In the 1703 edition of his tract,
Some Thoughts on Education
, he argued that:
Every one is now full of the miracles
done by cold baths on decay’d and weak
constitutions, for the recovery of health
and strength; and therefore they cannot
be impracticable or intolerable for the
improving and hardening the bodies of
those who are in better circumstances.
John Floyer, a Staffordshire doctor, was one
of the most high-profile medical men actively
promoting cold bathing during this period; his
pioneering work,
An Enquiry into the Right Use
and Abuses of the Hot, Cold and Temperate Baths
in England,
was published in 1697. Floyer’s
belief in cold water was not confined to the
written treatise, for in the 1690s he constructed
his own small bathing spa, St Chad’s Bath at
Unite’s Well, about a mile from Lichfield. The
restored remains of the spa are in the grounds
of Maple Hayes School, near Lichfield.
It is perhaps not surprising that cold
baths began to appear in several local gardens
soon after. One of the first was constructed
at Streethay Manor, north of Lichfield.
This is a fascinating moated site with strong
Floyer associations, as he was the relative and
friend of the family that owned the house,
the Pyotts. The remains of a late 17th- or
early-18th-century spring-fed, stone-cold
plunge bath-house (illustrated right) can
still be found in the grounds, no doubt built
with Floyer’s encouragement. It was placed
between the house and moat and is now
free-standing, but the stone foundations of a
wall running parallel to its south side have
recently been uncovered, suggesting that the
pyramidal-roofed structure might have been
the wellhead to a much larger cold bath room.
Cold bath houses and pools in
the landscape
Plunge pools and cold baths took several
different forms. The plunge pool at the
Georgian House in Bristol was built within
the actual villa in the 1790s by John Pinney,
a man who wanted his house filled with all
the latest modern conveniences. This reflects
a desire to explore new technologies and
possibly also later medical theories concerning
the need to regulate the temperature of the
water into which one plunged – something
which could be achieved more easily indoors.
Similarly, the late 18th-century plunge pool
at Greenway, Devon, was also fully enclosed,
although in this case the bath house was
situated away from the main house, on the
banks of the picturesque River Dart.
Plunge pools at Painswick in
Gloucestershire and Stourhead in Wiltshire,
on the other hand, are both external, each
differing in their placement. The 18th-century
plunge pool at Painswick (illustrated overleaf)
commanded open views across the landscape.
At Stourhead, in Wiltshire, the pool was
set within an ornamental grotto containing
statues and purposely sited to exploit a
designed view across the lake (top left).
In 1765 Joseph Spence described how the
jagged opening was ‘coverable with a sort of
Curtain, when you chuse it’, so that the inner
darkness could be transformed at the pull of
a drape, and plunge pool bathers could be
protected from the prying eyes of visitors on
the lake’.
3
In fact, the only way to get the view
through the grotto opening is to be at the
level of someone standing in the cold bath.
The remains of the late 17th or early 18th century bath house at Streethay, Staffordshire, which may well have been designed
with advice from cold bathing advocate, John Floyer (Photo: Timothy Mowl)
The view through the grotto and across the lake that Henry Hoare and his rollicking visitors
would have enjoyed in the plunge pool at Stourhead, Wiltshire (Photo: Timothy Mowl)
The statue of Neptune in the grotto at Stourhead