The Roman spring that was really a complaints box

Here is the Bath detail I love, and almost everyone misses it because they are too busy admiring the steaming green water and the golden Georgian terraces. Everyone knows the Roman Baths as a place to bathe. Hardly anyone knows that the sacred spring at the heart of it doubled as the ancient world's lost property desk and curse line rolled into one.

The Romans built a temple here to the goddess Sulis Minerva, right over the hot spring, and bathers kept hitting the same everyday problem: you left your clothes to one side, you got into the water, and someone helped themselves to your tunic and cloak. So the victims fought back the only way they could. They scratched a message onto a thin sheet of lead or pewter, sometimes listing every possible suspect by name, and dropped it into the spring for the goddess to deal with. Archaeologists have pulled around 130 of these curse tablets out of the water. They ask her to deny the thief sleep and health until the goods are returned, and one, robbed of a bronze vessel, asks that it be filled with the thief's own blood. They are the earliest surviving prayers to a god anywhere in Britain, and UNESCO put them on its Memory of the World register in 2014.

I painted the Great Bath in watercolour and ink, that green water steaming against the old stone, and the whole time I kept thinking about all those furious little notes lying at the bottom, waiting on a goddess to catch a towel thief. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here:  The Roman Baths, Bath · Travel Poster