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Buxton
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BUXTON
, twenty miles north of Ashbourne, was founded in 79 AD by the Romans, who happened upon a spring from which 1500 gallons of pure water gushed every hour at a constant 28A°C. So famous did the spring become that Mary, Queen of Scots, was allowed by her captors to come here for treatment of her rheumatism. The spa's heyday came at the end of the eighteenth century with the fifth Duke of Devonshire's grand design to create a northern answer to Bath or Cheltenham, a plan thwarted by the climate, but not before some distinguished eighteenth-century buildings had been erected.
Like many former British spas, the town's heritage has been marred by a lack of money to refurbish ageing properties, though a belated attempt has been made to rescue some of the finer buildings. The thermal baths were closed in 1972, but the sweep of the Crescent , incorporating the former St Ann's Hotel - its grandest architectural feature, modelled on the Royal Crescent in Bath - has been preserved thanks to a hefty government grant. The little street fountain in front of the Crescent, supplied by St Ann's Well, is still used to fill local water bottles and the nearby Pump Room , first erected in 1894, provides space for temporary art exhibitions in the summer. At the eastern end of the Crescent, a glass and cast-iron canopy hides the entrance to the Cavendish Arcade shopping centre, which makes a hash of preserving the original eighteenth-century bath houses. The spa remnants apart, the town is at its best in the nearby landscaped Pavilion Gardens , just to the southwest of the Crescent and the home of the grand - and grandly refurbished - thousand-seat Opera House (tours usually Sat at 11am; tel 01298/72190), facing Water Street. This is the main venue for the Buxton Festival held over two weeks at the back end of July. The glasshouse gardens next to the Opera House shelter an array of exotic foliage and you can walk through to the double-decker glass-and-iron pavilion itself, where there's a bar, coffee shop and restaurant with nice views. Fronting the Crescent, an attractive park known as The Slopes - laid out in 1818 in the last flush of municipal enthusiasm - leads up to the traffic-choked Market Place. The top of The Slopes offers the best prospect over the Crescent to the Palace Hotel and the Devonshire Hospital ; the latter, built in 1790 as a riding school, is covered by what for a long time was the world's widest domed roof. Just along Terrace Road from Market Place, the Buxton Museum and Art Gallery (Easter-Oct Tues-Fri 9.30am-5.30pm, Sat 9am-5pm, Sun 10.30am-5pm; rest of year closed Sun; A?1) houses a collection of ancient fossils, rocks and pots found in the Peak District, among them jawbones from Neolithic lions and bears. The displays on the first floor document the history of the region - and the town - from the Bronze Age through to more recent times.
As rewarding as any of Buxton's architectural attractions is
Poole's Cavern
(Easter-Oct daily 10am-5pm; A?4.50; tel 01298/26978), a mile to the south of town: follow the Broadwalk through the Pavilion Gardens and then take Temple Road. The guided-tour patter is irksome, but the orange and blue-grey stalactite formations are amazingly complex and the chambers impressively large; one marks the underground source of the River Wye. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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United Kingdom,
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