Bath's history runs far deeper than its Georgian facades: an Iron Age hillfort above the valley, a Saxon-era earthwork on the downs, a 1174 almshouse still housing residents, and terraces built by speculators the 1793 bank crash ruined.
An Iron Age hillfort ringed by a drystone-faced rampart, occupied from about 300 BCE and burnt around 100 BCE. The flat 190m summit plateau is National Trust land, open dawn to dusk, with the whole Avon valley below.
A surviving stretch of Bath's medieval city wall still stands above Upper Borough Walls. Five minutes south in Chapel Court, St John's Hospital has housed the city's poor since Bishop Reginald Fitz Jocelin founded it in 1174.
Bathampton Down carries the Wansdyke, a post-Roman defensive earthwork raised against the advancing West Saxons, alongside Bronze Age field systems and Ralph Allen's 1762 Sham Castle — a one-sided screen folly built to improve his view.
A medieval leper hospital chapel on the steep Fosse Way descent into Bath, rebuilt in 1495 by Prior Cantlow and restored in 1823. Holloway's cobbled climb was the route pilgrims and travellers took down to the hot springs.
The Royal Crescent's first house, built 1767-1774 to John Wood the Younger's design and furnished exactly as it stood in the 1770s, from the servants' kitchen to the withdrawing room. Run by the Bath Preservation Trust.
John Wood the Elder's 1754 ring of 33 townhouses, its three tiers of columns carrying 525 carved emblems and crowned with stone acorns — a Georgian answer to Stonehenge. The Gravel Walk behind leads to the 1760s Georgian Garden.
19 New King Street, where William Herschel identified Uranus from the back garden on 13 March 1781 while earning his living as organist at Bath's Octagon Chapel. His sister Caroline's basement workshop is laid out as they used it.
Robert Adam's 1774 bridge, one of a handful worldwide lined with shops on both sides, opens onto William Pulteney's speculative new town: Great Pulteney Street, 335m long and 30m wide, left half-built when the 1793 bank crash hit.
A former real-tennis court on Julian Road holding the complete works of J.B. Bowler — fizzy-drink maker and brass founder — sealed in 1969 exactly as it had run since 1872, alongside the quarrymen and cabinetmakers who built Georgian Bath.
Bath's artisan quarter follows the old Fosse Way north of the city walls, outside Georgian planning control: flea market, working foundry and antique yards, below the curving 1768 Paragon terrace where Jane Austen's aunt lived at No. 1.
Claverton Manor, built 1820, holds the only museum of Americana outside the United States: 18 period rooms shipped over from New England to New Mexico, a Shaker meeting room and a folk-art gallery, in gardens high above the Avon.
Widcombe held onto its village identity below the city: the 1656 manor house, the church of St Thomas à Becket, and the Kennet & Avon Canal's flight of locks cut in 1810 to drop Somerset coal barges down to the Avon.