Roman baths and family history

Today we woke up in Bath, and walked the couple of blocks from our B&B to the Roman Baths Museum. It was much more substantial than I had expected! Aside from the multiple baths themselves, there were also carvings, coins, bits of everyday Roman life, and even curses written on tin that were thrown into the water with the hopes the water's patron goddess would make them come true. Very cool.

You can also see in the above photo that I'm wearing the beautiful scarf that Mary gave me yesterday!

We then hopped in the car, and drove four hours through some beautiful countryside to Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, which according to the genealogy books is the place where Thomas Ellithorpe (the first Ellithorpe in America) was born.

It is a really cute little town, with very nice people. It reminded us a bit of Skaneateles, really. They even have similar population sizes! We then went to the top of the huge hill overlooking the town where the historic old church is (built in the 1300s), which would have been there when my ancestors were there. Unfortunately none of the gravestones from prior to 1775 were actually legible (and many had fallen down and been overgrown), but the old cemetery was still very cool even though we couldn't find any graves with "Ellithorpe" on them. The church was beautiful, and the view from the high vantage point was spectacular (of course, impossible to photograph well).

 So, we drove 30 minutes from there to York, where we checked into our B&B for the night (The Acer Guest House - thanks for the suggestion, Ellen!).

And we took a walk into the downtown of York (which, by the way, is surrounded all around by a Medieval wall!) and had dinner at Betty's Tea Room, which was delicious. We finished up the night by doing the Original York Ghost Walk, which was chilly (it got cold while we were eating dinner!) but fun.

Tomorrow we will do the York Castle Museum and York Minster Abbey before heading north to Hadrian's Wall and Edinburgh. This is our last night in England, as from now until we leave we will be in Scotland!