Bath Uphill and Upriver: A Second Day on the Slopes and Towpaths

Bath's famous half-mile is genuinely small. From the Abbey churchyard you can reach the Roman Baths, the Pump Room, the Circus and the Royal Crescent on foot inside twenty minutes, and most visitors do all of it in one long morning. That is both the city's problem and its gift: the honeypot is so compact that by lunchtime on the second day the guidebook is finished, and the rest of Bath is still sitting there, largely uninspected, on the hills.

Because Bath is built in a bowl. The Georgian terraces climb the sides of the Avon valley, and almost everything that is not on the walking-tour route is either uphill from the centre or upriver from it. That single fact is the most useful planning tool you have here. Pick a direction, gain fifty metres of height or two miles of towpath, and the crowd thins to nothing — not because these places are secret, but because they ask for a gradient.

What follows is a second and third day organised by direction rather than by theme: east up Bathwick Hill, south over Widcombe and Combe Down, north to Walcot and Larkhall, and upriver by boat. Most of it is free, and almost all of it is walkable from the centre.

Walk the rim: the Bath Skyline

The National Trust's Bath Skyline is a waymarked circuit of roughly six miles, about ten kilometres, around the eastern hills, and the Trust suggests allowing something in the region of three and a half to four hours. It is free, it needs no booking, and you can join it on foot from the centre — which makes it, for a city this compressed, the single best-value half-day on offer.

The unpleasant part comes first. Bathwick Hill is a long, steady, unromantic climb out of the valley past university buildings, and it is worth accepting that the first twenty-five minutes are work rather than pleasure. After that the route opens into meadow and beech woodland along Bathampton Down, with the whole Georgian city laid out below in a way no street-level viewpoint can manage.

Two stops repay the short detour. Sham Castle is exactly what its name admits: a one-sided screen of battlements and towers with nothing behind it, put up in the 1760s for Ralph Allen, the postal reformer and quarry owner whose stone built much of the city, purely so that he would have something to look at from his townhouse. It sits about two hundred metres off the main route. Smallcombe Cemetery, in the fold between Widcombe Hill and Bathwick Hill, is two adjoining Victorian burial grounds — an Anglican churchyard and a nonconformist cemetery with a chapel by Alfred Goodridge — closed to new burials since the late 1980s and now half-reclaimed by trees. It is the quietest place within a mile of the Abbey.

If four hours is too much, do the eastern half: up Bathwick Hill, along the down to Sham Castle, then drop down through Smallcombe into Widcombe for lunch. That is around two hours. One practical warning: this is limestone over clay, and the woodland stretches hold water badly from autumn through to early spring. Late spring and early autumn are the right seasons here, and proper shoes matter more than the distance suggests.

Prior Park, and a bridge you are allowed to walk across

On the southern slope, Prior Park Landscape Garden is the same Ralph Allen's garden, laid out in the eighteenth century with input from the poet Alexander Pope and later from Capability Brown. It is essentially one long lawn falling away down a combe, with the city framed at the bottom of it and a chain of lakes at the foot.

The reason to come is the Palladian bridge of 1755, a covered, colonnaded crossing that the National Trust describes as one of only four of its kind in the world and the last surviving example in England. You can walk through it, sit in it, and see it doubled in the water below, which is not something the photographs quite prepare you for.

The logistics are unusual and worth knowing in advance, because people get caught out. There is no visitor parking on site at all — this is deliberate, and the Trust directs people to the park-and-ride sites or city-centre car parks instead. Most visitors arrive on foot up a steep climb from Widcombe, or take the number 2 bus from the city to the top entrance and walk down through the garden. No pre-booking is needed; expect to pay something under GBP 10 for a non-member adult at the time of writing, and nothing if you carry a National Trust card. Allow an hour to ninety minutes.

The efficient move is to combine it with the Skyline, which passes close by, and then walk down into Widcombe rather than back up the hill.

Walcot Street, which is Bath's other high street

North of the centre, where the city thins out along the London Road, Walcot Street is the closest thing Bath has to a functioning independent quarter: antiques, furniture, ceramics, bicycles, secondhand books, a community garden at the lower end, and a run of places to eat that locals use on ordinary weekdays.

Go on a Saturday morning if you can. The antique and flea market has been a fixture of the street for more than forty years and now sits back on its original cattle-market pitch — clothes, books, crockery, tools, a lot of nonsense and occasionally something good. It typically runs from mid-morning through the afternoon.

Landrace is the anchor. Downstairs is a bakery working with stoneground British grain, and the sourdough is the reason there is usually a queue; upstairs is a small restaurant, Upstairs at Landrace, which is listed in the Michelin Guide. Book the upstairs room ahead, and treat the bakery as the plan B that is almost as good.

A few doors along, the Bell Inn is worth a stop even if you are not drinking. It has been co-operatively owned since 2013 by several hundred of its own customers, staff and neighbours — the pub's own account records it as the largest buyout of its kind in Britain at that point — and it has kept the things that made it worth saving: local ale, free live music several nights a week, a record collective on the decks, and sourdough pizza from a stall in the covered garden. There is no cover charge for the music.

For dinner nearer the centre, Yak Yeti Yak has been serving Nepalese and Tibetan cooking as a family-run independent since the mid-2000s, and Corkage is the name locals give when asked where to drink wine seriously without being lectured. Expect roughly GBP 30 to GBP 40 a head for two courses at the better independents, before wine.

Larkhall: a village the city grew around

About a mile northeast of the centre, Larkhall is a genuine surprise — a small grid of pastel terraces with a working village high street inside a World Heritage city. There is a butcher that supplies half the neighbourhood, a farm shop, a deli and café, a florist and a flower school, a hardware shop that still sells single screws, a printmakers' studio, and the Beaufort Bookshop, run by a former head of English, which mixes modern stock with scarce antiquarian editions and doubles as a tutoring room and events space. Two pubs, the Rose and Crown and the Larkhall Inn, do the social work. Alice Park, with its café, is a short walk away.

The real draw is the Rondo Theatre, a fringe venue of about a hundred seats in the former hall of St Saviour's church, running since the late 1980s on touring theatre, comedy and one-person shows. Tickets are usually in the mid-teens in pounds with a couple of pounds off for concessions, plus a small per-ticket levy toward the building's restoration. Check the programme before you plan your evenings, because a good night here is a much better use of a Wednesday than a second spa visit.

Getting there on foot along the London Road is functional rather than lovely, around twenty-five minutes. The better route follows the river out through Kensington Meadows, which turns the walk into part of the day.

Widcombe: five minutes from the station, and nobody goes

Widcombe sits immediately behind Bath Spa railway station, across the river, and the walk from the platform takes about five minutes. Almost no arriving visitor turns that way.

Widcombe Parade is a short terrace doing an unreasonable amount of work: the Ring O'Bells and the Ram for pub cooking, the Halfpenny for small plates and wine, a well-regarded deli for picnic material, a Colombian-run café for the mid-morning gap, a long-standing curry house, and the Widcombe Social Club for music. It is where you eat on the evening you cannot face the centre.

Behind it, the Kennet and Avon Canal climbs away from the river through the Widcombe lock flight, which includes Bath Deep Lock — formed in the 1970s by combining two locks and often listed among the deepest in the country. Walking up the towpath beside it, with narrowboats working through, is a twenty-minute diversion that most people never find. From the top you can carry on east toward Sydney Gardens, or turn uphill for Prior Park.

The cheapest good view in Bath

Alexandra Park, eleven acres on the flat top of Beechen Cliff, opened in 1902 to mark the coronation of Edward VII and looks straight down the length of the city with the hills behind it. Bathscape, the local landscape partnership, titles its route up there simply as the walk to Bath's best view, which is at least an honest claim from people who know the alternatives.

You reach it either by Jacob's Ladder, a long flight of steps with a bench near the top carrying a sign counting down the last forty, or by the gentler curve of Shakespeare Avenue. From Bath Spa station allow fifteen to twenty-five minutes depending on which you choose and how you feel about steps. It is free, there are public toilets for a small coin charge, and late afternoon is the hour to be there.

Two tunnels under Combe Down

The Two Tunnels Greenway is the best idea anyone has had in Bath in decades: a flat, traffic-free path of roughly 3.8 miles, about six kilometres, laid along the trackbed of the old Somerset and Dorset railway, now part of the National Cycle Network. Flat is the operative word in a city where everything else involves a climb.

The route leaves the south side of the city through Oldfield Park, enters the Devonshire Tunnel — around 450 yards — then emerges into the green trough of Lyncombe Vale before the main event. Combe Down Tunnel runs for about 1,829 yards, over a mile, and Visit Bath describes it as the longest walking and cycling tunnel in Britain. It is lit, and carries a light and sound installation that responds as you move through it. It is also properly cold and echoing whatever the weather outside is doing, so carry a layer even in August. Beyond it the path crosses the Tucking Mill viaduct and reaches Midford.

On foot, out and back is about three hours. By bike it is an easy ninety minutes, and hire shops in the city will set you up for roughly what you would expect to pay for a half-day rental. Turn at Midford and retrace it; the tunnels are better in the second direction anyway, because you know what is coming.

Upriver: boats, and the pleasure garden that survived

Bath Boating Station, in Bathwick, is a Victorian boathouse hiring punts, skiffs, rowing boats, canoes and kayaks on a stretch of the Avon that has been hired out since the 1830s. It runs seasonally, roughly April to September, typically Wednesday to Sunday in high summer, in one- and two-hour slots; expect to pay somewhere around GBP 10 to GBP 15 a head. There is about two miles of navigable river upstream toward Bathampton, where a riverside pub at Bathampton Mill gives you a reason to turn around, and the Bathwick Boatman restaurant sits on the boathouse site itself.

A short walk from there, Sydney Gardens is described as the only surviving eighteenth-century pleasure garden in England, and it has recently had a restoration funded largely by the National Lottery Heritage Fund at a total project cost in the region of GBP 3.4 million. The Holburne Museum occupies the old Sydney Hotel at its gate, the Kennet and Avon Canal threads through the park in an ornamental cutting, and Brunel's main line cuts through it too, so the whole thing is a layered diagram of three centuries of transport. Jane Austen lodged nearby and walked here. Entry to the gardens is free.

One thing to check rather than assume: Cleveland Pools, the river lido of 1815 designed by John Pinch the elder and believed to be the oldest public outdoor swimming pool in Britain, reopened in 2023 and then closed again after serious flood damage in January 2024. The trust behind it is consulting on a sustainable route to reopening, but at the time of writing it is shut. Do not build an afternoon around it without looking first.

Three small museums worth the climb

The Herschel Museum of Astronomy occupies a modest Georgian townhouse on New King Street, and it is the most quietly astonishing address in the city. William Herschel and his sister Caroline lived here, and it was from the small back garden, with a telescope he had built himself, that he identified Uranus in 1781 — the first planet discovered in recorded history. The garden has been replanted to a list of species known to have grown here in the 1790s, and a piece of commissioned stonework marks where he was standing. It opens Tuesday to Sunday in season, typically from mid-morning to late afternoon, entry is under GBP 10, and forty-five minutes is enough.

The American Museum and Gardens, at Claverton on the ridge east of the city, is a Grade I listed nineteenth-century house holding American furniture, quilts and folk art, with gardens looking down the Avon valley. It opens Tuesday to Sunday from around mid-February to the end of December. Bus 18 or the 418 university service will get you to The Avenue, from which it is a ten to fifteen minute walk. Give it half a day.

Beckford's Tower, on Lansdown to the north, reopened after a refurbishment costing in the region of GBP 3.9 million and took gold as small visitor attraction of the year in the 2025 regional tourism awards. It is a neoclassical tower built for the writer and collector William Beckford, and the point of it is the spiral stair to the belvedere at the top. It opens weekends only through the season, roughly from February to late October with shorter winter hours after that, and buses run up Lansdown from near Milsom Street. Book online rather than turning up.

How to order it

If you have two extra days, the clean split is direction. Give day two to the north and the low ground: Walcot Street in the morning, ideally a Saturday for the market, lunch at the bakery, then either Sydney Gardens and the boats or the climb to Alexandra Park, and dinner in Widcombe. Give day three to height: the eastern half of the Skyline, dropping into Prior Park, then down to Widcombe again for a late lunch. If the forecast is poor, swap the hills for the Two Tunnels, because a mile of it is indoors.

Budget modestly. The Skyline, Sydney Gardens, Alexandra Park, Walcot Street, Larkhall, Widcombe and the tunnels cost nothing. Around GBP 25 to GBP 35 a head covers the paid entries you are likely to want. Buses are contactless and a day ticket is a few pounds, which is worth buying if you are doing Prior Park and Beckford's Tower in the same stretch.

Two things to skip. Do not bring a car for any of this — Prior Park has no parking by design, the hill streets are hostile, and the park-and-ride is cheaper than an hour in a central car park. And do not save this half of Bath for a return trip you may not take. The Roman Baths will still be there. Sham Castle at six on a clear September evening, with the whole city gold below you and nobody else on the down, is the thing people actually remember.