The Roman Baths, Bath · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Everyone comes to the Roman Baths for the steaming green water and the honey coloured Georgian city built around it, and almost nobody knows that this same sacred spring was once the ancient world's complaints box. When the Romans raised their temple to the goddess Sulis Minerva over the hot spring here, bathers kept running into a very ordinary problem: while you soaked, someone would quietly wander off with your tunic, your cloak, your bathing costume, even your gloves. So the wronged would scratch a message onto a thin sheet of lead or pewter, roll it up, and drop it into the water for the goddess to sort out. Archaeologists have lifted around 130 of these curse tablets from the spring, and they are wonderfully petty and human. People write out their list of suspects by name, beg the goddess to deny the thief sleep and health until the goods come back, and one furious victim, robbed of a bronze vessel, asks that it be filled with the thief's own blood. They are written in Latin, they are the earliest surviving prayers to a god anywhere in Britain, and in 2014 UNESCO added them to its Memory of the World register, the only objects from Roman Britain on the list. The guidebooks tell you about the crescents and the hot spring. They rarely tell you that for centuries people were dropping handwritten curses into that beautiful green water over a stolen towel.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.