From the canal there is a beautiful walk along Sydney Buildings, Horseshoe Walk and Abbey View back up Widcombe Hill to The Tea Shed at Prior Park. Then there was time for a walk round the beautiful gardens of Prior Park before we set off for the half hour downhill back to the station – a day thoroughly to be recommended.

After an hour at The Empire we went to the canal and walked from the lock by the station along the tow path to Sydney Gardens. It was magical: a whole part of Bath hitherto unknown to us. Then we had a severe attack of house envy walking along Sydney Buildings.

After Widcombe and Beechen Cliff we felt the need for brunch and walked down to Garfunkel’s in The Empire for a curiously delicious vegetarian breakfast: we sat out on the sunny terrace overlooking the Abbey and Pulteney Bridge reading the Observer and uttered a little shriek when we discovered Rachel Cooke’s generous paean to The Godwits Fly.

Half an hour’s (very steep up-and-down) walk took us from Widcombe to Beechen Cliff. In Northanger Abbey the Tilneys and Catherine Morland ‘determined on walking round Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath.’ Henry Tilney ‘talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances — side-screens and perspectives — lights and shades; — and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape.’

On May 26th 1801 Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra: ‘I walked yesterday morning with Mrs Chamberlayne to Lyncombe and Widcombe  – Mrs Chamberlayne’s pace was not quite so magnificent on this second trial as in the first; it was nothing more than I could keep up with, without effort, & for many, many Yards together on a raised narrow footpath I led the way. – The Walk was very beautiful as my companion agreed, whenever I made the observation.’ Some of us from Persephone Books had a similar walk yesterday: we began (twenty minutes walk uphill from Bath Spa Station) by admiring the church and, next to it, Widcombe Manor; both would have looked exactly the same when Jane Austen and Mrs Chamberlayne walked past.

Eric Ravilious did this wood engraving of Tirzah in 1929. It was used as the illustration for ‘October’ in the 1929 Almanack: Twelve Designs Engraved on Wood by Eric Ravilious.

The Aunt or Kensington High Street 1929 has Tirzah herself in the lefthand corner with a briefcase with TG on it. Robert Harling wrote in 1987: ‘The wry amusement she derived from the vagaries of the English class system, first encountered head-on in her upper-middle-class parents’ thumbs-down attitude to the humbler background of Eric Ravilious, was clearly evident in her wood engravings. Here were the social quirks and oddities which are apt to mystify, disconcert and occasionally infuriate foreigners. I thoroughly enjoyed the scenes depicted as well as the authority of her engravings. When I voiced these views, Tirzah laughed merrily and agreed that they possibly – possibly, mark you! – held a grain or so of truth.’  She was 21 when she did these wood engravings…