The ancient city of Bath is home to a number of myths, legends, natural phenomena and a Romano-Celtic goddess cult.

But let us begin with the legendary founder of Bath, King Bladud, allegedly in the year 863BC.

Legend has it that the king, the father of King Lear as popularised by Shakespeare, spent his salad days learning in Athens where he unfortunately contracted leprosy.

Banished from court and demoted to looking after pigs the resourceful Bladud hit upon a scheme after observing the animals’ blemish-free skin after rolling in local steaming muds fed by a H๏τ spring.

Fearing he would be snubbed as king forever due to his own skin ailment, he hatched a plan to bathe in the restorative H๏τ springs himself.

And, according to the tale, the dermatological disaster was overcome by the mystical properties of the sacred spring of Bath.

Bladud becomes king and founds the city of Bath with a temple to Sulis, otherwise known as Sul, the Celtic goddess of springs, at the site of his miraculous healing.

Bladud’s legendary ancestry feeds into the very mythology of Britain itself, despite no actual proof of his existence.

Bladud is represented on a side wall at the Roman Baths.

In his Historia Regum Britanniae of 1136, the chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth extrapolates Bladud’s lineage back to the siege of Troy and claims he is a descendant of the legendary Brutus.

Brutus is seen in the mythology as the first king of Britain and a descendant of Aeneas – a Trojan noble and refugee from the destruction of the city by the Mycenaean Greeks.

The occupying Romans, using their usual policy of interpretatio Romana, conflated Sulis with their own goddess of wisdom, Minerva, leading to the site of the baths being regarded as a Romano-British temple to the compound deity Sulis-Minerva.

In fact the site was the goddess’ principal shrine. She occupied a high status in Britannia and, in particular, in Romano-British Bath, which the Romans called Aquae Sulis.

The Roman Minerva was essentially a different deity and Sulis-Minerva was very much a goddess native to Britannia.

But the fusion of Roman and Celtic did not always go so smoothly.

In the reign of the Emperor Nero the revolt by the Iceni queen Boudicca led to open conflict, as her warriors rampaged across what is now southern England, burning Colchester, St Albans and London, before the rebellion was put down.

The Roman appeтιтe for slavery also hit the Celtic population hard, particularly on the Druid stronghold of Anglesey, where these chains were found.

But there were many instances where the two cultures intertwined in artistic and devotional expression including in the design of the Meyrick helmet, dated AD 50-100.

The helmet combines a Roman shape with traditional Celtic decoration.

The baths of Aquae Sulis once featured a fire-lit gilded statue of Sulis-Minerva, which would have looked spectacular and awe-inspiring to the many pilgrims who flocked to the site during Roman rule.

Only the head survives, stripped of its former helmet by violent means.

Linguistically sul- is related to the Indo-European root for ‘sun’, which in turn can be linked to the heat of Bath’s natural springs.

Her medicinally-attested waters might be used for a range of conditions, among them the problems of mothers unable to nurse their children.

Models of bronze and ivory breasts found at Bath may have been worn as amulets to encourage lactation for this purpose.

But Sulis was also a scold. Sheets of pewter or lead inscribed with messages to the goddess called for divine retribution. These notes are known as defixiones and were targeted at thieves or enemies of devotees.

The pre-Roman Sulis may have originally been male and could have been ᴀssociated with the Celtic (and originally Indo-European) concept of the sun wheel, which could account for the mysterious ‘Gorgon’s Head’, which was part of the Bath temple complex.

The religious nature of the site has persisted for centuries, even after Christianity arrived.

It can be seen as no accident that the magnificent Bath Abbey is situated just feet away from the Roman Baths – essentially built on top of the pagan temple.

And, as is so often the case, this helps to smooth the transition from one belief system to another while maintaining the same holy sites.