Bath Abbey Tower, Bridge, and a Boat Tour

September 29, 2026

If you read my post from this morning, I left you at Bath Abbey with a cliffhanger. I said I’d be back at the Abbey and that it was exciting. I went back to climb up the Bath Abbey Tower. In addition, this afternoon, I also walked across the Pulteney Bridge, took a boat tour, and walked around Bath a bit before catching a train back to my base in nearby Bristol, England.

The train I took back was a little longer than the one to Bath because there was a stop on the way back, but not on the way out. Even still, the train took only about fifteen minutes.

Before getting into the excitement, an apology. Today is another day when I didn’t finish my morning post until after I got back from dinner. Consequently, it’s now late as I start this post about my afternoon activities. As a result, I’m probably going to rush through it, make a lot of mistakes, and leave out a lot of stuff, maybe even some of the compelling stuff. Sorry about that.

Let’s go.

Bath Abbey Tower

As I was leaving the Abbey this morning at lunchtime, I saw a sign in the pews indicating a Bath Abbey Tower tour meeting point. This is different from the Abbey tour I took this morning, which was included in the Abbey entry fee. I asked the staff member standing by the sign about the tour. He said there is a separate fee and I’d have to buy a ticket.

Before today, I had read about the ability to climb the Bath Abbey Tower, but I forgot about it while I was in the Abbey, until I saw the sign. I went back outside to the ticket desk. The sign in the ticket office that gave information about the Abbey entry fee didn’t mention the tower. That is why I wasn’t reminded about the tower when I went in the morning. There is a separate sign for the Bath Abbey Tower Tour elsewhere. I asked the ticket seller if I could buy a separate ticket just for the tower and use the ticket I already had to gain reentry into the Abbey. The answer to both questions was yes.

I asked how often the tour went up the Bath Abbey Tower. Every hour.

Back of the clock in the Bath Abbey Tower

I’d just missed one tour. So I went for a quick lunch nearby and returned for the next tour.

There are two hundred and I forget how many steps up the Bath Abbey Tower. They are on narrow, spiral staircases. But there are two intermediate stops on the way up, so I got a break.

The first stop was in the bell-ringing room. There are two ways the bells are rung. One set of ropes, one rope for each of the ten bells, spins the bells upside down and then lets them drop down right-way up, creating a very loud sound. The other ropes tug on hammers beside the bells to make quieter sounds.

There are trap doors in the floor and the ceiling of this room. That’s how they hauled the bells up and lowered them down when they needed to be recast. The bells are too big and the stairwell too narrow to carry them up and down the stairs.

There are two rooms off to the side of the bell-ringing room. One provides a view to the top of the vaulting of the Abbey, a fair piece below the roof. Down at the far end of the vaulting, there’s a ventilation hole that’s visible from the room. Plus, they’ve drilled a small hole in the vaulting, a piece down the curve of the vault, but beside the room. The hole is too small to be spotted from the floor of the Abbey, but it was big enough that we could see how thick the vaulting is. The answer is, not very thick. However, the guide said it’s thicker at the top of the arch.

The other room is at the back of the Bath Abbey Tower’s clock, where we could see the clock’s mechanism. Oh, did I forget to mention it’s a clock tower? Unlike in many clock towers, the clock here is not near the top of the tower. According to the guide, it originally was at the top. However, the clock proved to be too heavy. It was making the tower unsteady. So they took it down and put in a new clock in the lower, thicker section of the tower.

The next stop up the tower was the bell room. It was hard to see the bells because most of them were sitting on the other side of some big, heavy wooden beams. However, bits of them were visible. And the biggest bell, the tenor bell, was clearly visible and near where we stood.

The final stop on the Bath Abbey Tower tour was on the flat roof of the tower. Fortunately, there were substantial walls high enough to keep my acrophobia at bay, but low enough that I could see over. According to the guide, that’s the highest point in the City of Bath. The views of the city and surrounding area were breathtaking. Then we walked all the way back down into the Abbey without stopping along the way.

Pictures from the roof of the Bath Abbey Tower:

Aside

The Name That Shall Not Be Mentioned

Standing at the top of the Bath Abbey Tower, the guide let us have some time to gaze intently out in the four directions from the tower.

There’s not a huge amount of space up there, but enough that the seven guests, including me, on the tour weren’t all standing in a clump. While I stared out from one side, I heard the guide ask some people on the other side where they were from. Australia.

The guide then came over to the side I was on. He asked a couple near me where they were from. California.

There’s one thing I’ve noticed. When people away from their home country are asked where they are from, most answer with their country. But Americans, almost invariably, answer not with their country, but with their state. I don’t know quite what to make of that, but it doesn’t matter because that wasn’t where I was going with this.

The guide then asked where I was from. Canada.

Whereabouts in Canada? Toronto. The guide beamed at this and said, “Oh, I have relatives in PEI.” Um. Okay. That’s quite a ways from Toronto, but great.

But that still isn’t where I was going with this.

Upon hearing I was from Canada, the Americans immediately felt the need to deeply apologize for their country. “WE’RE SOOOO SORRY,” they both said in unison.

The woman said she was desperately hoping for what she called “the big thud.” We talked about the horrible situation in their country for the few more minutes up top, all the way back down the stairs of the Bath Abbey Tower, and for a few minutes back in the Abbey. The couple plans to crack open a bottle of champagne when the big thud happens. They’re hoping that there will be enough of a blue tsunami in the upcoming U.S. midterm elections and the new Congress will grow enough of a backbone to impeach him finally.

Throughout the whole conversation, neither they nor I mentioned his name. Not once. It was the name that was not to be mentioned.

This is not the first time this has happened to me since the second inauguration of the name that is not to be mentioned. The most notable of the incidents was on a food tour I took in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Pulteney Bridge

The Pulteney Bridge crosses the River Avon. Its claim to fame is that there are shops along both sides of the bridge. To be honest, it wasn’t all that interesting. The shops go right out to the edge of the bridge on both sides, and the shops along each side abut one another.

Walking along the bridge felt no different than walking along a normal shop-lined street firmly on land. I couldn’t see the river at all while on the bridge. If someone had blindfolded me and guided me to the bridge, not taking the blindfold off until I was on the bridge, I wouldn’t have known I was on a bridge until I got to the other end and looked back.

I’ve been to and on the Rialto Bridge in Venice and the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. This is no Rialto Bridge or Ponte Vecchio. Enough said.

Avon Boat Tour

When I got to the other side of the Pulteneny Bridge and looked down upon the River Avon, I saw what looked like a small, two-deck, open-top tour boat tied up to the dock. I walked down there to investigate. It was indeed a tour boat that went up the River Avon. The tour lasted an hour; tickets were sold only on board; and the next tour was leaving in about ten minutes. I went.

The tour started just above a weir in the centre of Bath. It travelled slowly to another weir upstream, then turned around and came back.

Outside of central Bath, for much of the way, both banks of the River Avon are thickly covered in verdant trees and bushes, with just a few buildings poking out. It was gorgeous and peaceful.

There was little commentary on the way out, but someone spoke over the speaker system on the way back. The little bits of what I remember from his talk are:

There are several River Avons in England. What the what? We were on the Bristol Avon. “Avon” means “river” in I don’t know what language. This bothered me for a few reasons. For one, why didn’t I know there are multiple River Avons in England? I always thought there was just the River Avon. Second, really? Weren’t they creative enough to come up with different names for every river? Isn’t that confusing? And, finally, if Avon means river, then River Avon translates to River River. That is as stupid as calling a street “Avenue Road.” Which, I have to admit, I didn’t notice was stupid until someone pointed out to me, well into my adulthood, how stupid a name “Avenue Road” is in my hometown, Toronto. (The person who pointed it out to me is a regular reader of this journal.)

Long ago, beavers and otters used to be plentiful in the area. However, beavers were hunted to extinction. Otters were hunted almost to extinction. However, beavers have started to make their way back, and the otter population is growing again. Beavers are still rarely seen, but the otters are more common. I saw an otter only thanks to another passenger saying to her companion, “Look! An otter!” I looked where she was pointing and saw it swimming in the water.

There are a lot of fish in the river. The commentator said there are often people fishing in it. We passed a group of three or four guys (they seemed to be together) doing just that.

More views from the River Avon boat tour:

Wandering Around Bath

After the boat tour, I wandered around Bath for a while. I wish I weren’t so tired, because I’d like to expand on how charming I think the city is. It’s low-rise. Pretty much all of the buildings I saw are made of handsome light-coloured stone blocks. The streetscapes are distinguished. I didn’t see any streets with a lot of traffic. And in central Bath, there are some lovely pedestrianized streets.

I walked up a hill to a neighbourhood called The Circus.

The green space of The Circus seen from across the street

In The Circus, a circular road surrounds a green space with grass and a clump of five very tall, spreading trees at its centre. The canopy practically covers the whole green space.

On the other side of the circular road, a ring of lovely three-storey stone-block townhouses forms a circle. The circle of townhouses is broken only by three roads that intersect in T-intersections with the circular road.

After leaving The Circus, I walked back to the train station for the short ride back to Bristol.

I’ll be in Bristol for another couple of days. I don’t know if I’ll make it back to Bath, but I’m definitely considering it because I greatly enjoyed the city.