FOR ANYONE SICK of the nature of motley London, awash with turbans, bargain-seeking tourists and solid rivers of traffic, it’s a good idea to hurry down to Bath, about 190 kilometres from the English capital. Built with slabs of oolite (a kind of sandstone that the city keeps laundered) in a circle of hills on the banks of the river Avon, Bath fulfills your fantasies about what England should be and frequently isn’t - a model of 18th century urban planning unequalled in the length and breadth of the Old Dart.

I’m always a bit embarrassed to admit I studied Anglo-Saxon history as a university subject. It’s really hard to strike up cocktail party conversation with people who have never heard of King Penda of Mercia or St Alfege, an early Archbishop of Canterbury who was bumped off by the East Saxons of London during a drunken party held for some visiting Irish Vikings. I mention this only because writing about Bath allows me to tell you that King Edgar, the first monarch of all England, had the sense to be crowned in Bath in 973. He also had the wit to change the Saxon name of the town - Akemanceaster (Ploughman’s town) - to Bathanceaster in recognition of the fact that the Roman Emperor, Claudius, had created Aquae Sulis here, an early spa for bored legionnaries in the coldest, dampest part of the empire.

In fact, you can still come to Bath for your health, which was the reason behind my most recent visit. The new spa complex in Bath, a 21st century update on the Roman original, is now the pride of the town as the World Heritage-listed city tries to compete with ritzy European watering holes like Baden-Baden and Biarritz. It fails, of course, because the English aren’t really at ease with sophistication and good living, no matter what the marketing brochures say about Cool Britannia. But sometimes they really do get it, as illustrated by The Bath Priory Hotel and Restaurant, a member of the Small Luxury Hotels of the World group.
The maitre d’ of The Bath Priory was keen to test our wine knowledge at the very first opportunity. A young waiter came to the table with six glasses of white wine, and we were immediately immersed in an Options game. It was a bit sweet, very cold-climate and very reminiscent of that grand old leg-opener, Zeller Schwarzer Katz from Germany. “Wrong,” said the smug orchestrator of the shebang. “It’s a riesling from Kent.” That knowledge didn’t make the wine taste any better, but it did give us plenty of excuses for it.

That said, this was the only jarring part of the visit, The Bath Priory is about a mile (the English stubbornly refuse to go metric) out of town, and is right in the heart of four acres of gorgeous manicured gardens. Built in 1835, it is simply one of the finest pieces of Gothic Revival architecture in England. An affable Italian, Vito Scaduto, runs the restaurant and Michelin-starred chef, Robert Clayton, turns out French and Mediterranean-influenced menus.

Back in our sumptuous Penny Morrison-designed bedrooms, it felt good to put a name behind almost every thing we saw and experienced. And no, I won’t reveal the moniker of the wonderful therapist who is to be found at the centre of the hotel’s spa centre (think swimming pools, saunas and treatment rooms); she will surely have been poached by a five-star London hotel before you get there.

English country house hotels can become addictive, and it certainly seemed so at our next stop - Homewood Park. Another Small Luxury Hotels of the World property, it bills itself as ‘standing in 10 acres of gardens and parkland only six miles from the World Heritage city of Bath’. That’s as may be, as they say in Scotland, but the claim that really interested me was: ‘menus are splendidly complemented by a selection of sensibly priced wines stored in the mediaeval cellars’. I’ll translate that sentence into reality for you. Believe me, a glass of Jacobs Creek does taste much better after having spent some time in a 14th century vault, as you glance across the landscape behind Homewood Park’s inarguable boast that ‘we overlook a designated area of outstanding natural beauty’. For those who would like to test the theory, you can book a stay at The Bath Priory and Homewood Park through Small Luxury Hotels Australian office by calling (02) 9411 5512 or 1800 251 958 toll-free.

It was time to test the words of Edward Fitzgerald, English translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, who said this of Bath: “If you ever live in England, you must live here in Bath. The streets are as handsome and as gay as London, gayer and handsomer because cleaner and in a cleaner atmosphere.” Before you think pink tourism has taken over Bath, Fitzgerald was using the word gay in its true sense. As with my snippet about King Edgar, few people know the planet Uranus was discovered in Bath. But everyone knows that Jane Austen lived here and so did Samuel Pepys, Dr Johnson, Horatio Nelson, Charles Dickens, Sir Isaac Pitman (who invented shorthand in the city), Clive of India and William Wordsworth. I discovered all this in a local pub, drinking a glass of white wine from one of the two local vineyards hereabouts. Amazingly, it tasted better. Oh, OK, after the third glass. In fact, the barman nearly reversed the old tourism cliche that’s it’s unwise to tour a country through the bottom of a glass.