Bath

Why come through here

Bath Spa station is on Dorchester Street in the city centre, about 1 hour 18 minutes from London Paddington with a train about every half hour and about 20 on a Sunday. For Castle Combe and Lacock the station you want is Chippenham, one stop east on the same line: Faresaver's X34 reaches Lacock in about 15 minutes, every half hour on weekdays, hourly on Saturdays and nine times on Sundays, and the 95 reaches Castle Combe in 28 minutes three times a day from Monday to Saturday (10.25am, 12.25pm and 2.25pm in autumn 2026), with two later 95A runs. From Bath itself, Stagecoach's 620 runs out by way of Yate and the Sodburys to Westonbirt and Tetbury, then on to Stroud, five times a day on weekdays and four on Saturdays, with nothing on Sundays. The times and the national bus fare cap (£3 a single to the end of 2026, £2 from 1 January 2027) are on the buses page, and the trains on getting here.

By car the M4 brings you to Bath from junction 18 down the A46, which is also the road to Dyrham and the southern Cotswold Way. Do not drive into the centre: Bath has three park and ride sites, Lansdown, Newbridge and Odd Down, and parking at all three is free if you use the bus and collect the car the same day. Lansdown (BA1 9BJ), on the north side, is the one for the Cotswolds, with 878 spaces, the 31 bus every 15 minutes from Monday to Friday until 8.30pm and then every half hour until 11.30pm, a £4 adult return, and the first bus at 6.15am.

A day in the city

Start at the abbey, because the Cotswold Way does. The marker stone outside the west front is Irish blue limestone, 1.4m across, carved by Iain Cotton with the trail's acorn and a verse from Jeremiah, and it has a twin, also by Cotton, at the start of the trail in Chipping Campden. The abbey is open from 10am to 5.30pm on weekdays, to 6pm on Saturdays and from 1pm to 3.30pm on Sundays, with last entry half an hour before closing. Next door are the Roman Baths, built over the hot spring, open daily from 9am to 6pm with last entry at 5pm in September and October; the winter hours are on its own site. An adult ticket booked ahead was £26.50 on a weekday and £29 at a weekend in September and October 2026, £2 more on the day. Buy only from the Roman Baths' own site, which warns of a fake one.

From the abbey it is a walk of about 15 minutes uphill by Milsom Street and the Circus to the Royal Crescent, John Wood the Younger's curve of houses above a lawn. No.1 Royal Crescent is a museum of a Georgian townhouse, open from Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 5.30pm, adult £16 (2026), closed on most Mondays and from 16 to 28 November 2026. The rest, from Pulteney Bridge to the Holburne Museum, is on Visit Bath (opens in a new tab).

Into the Cotswolds from here

The Cotswolds proper begin on the hills north and east of the city, and the walk that shows it is the Bath Skyline, the National Trust's waymarked loop over the downs on the east side, with Prior Park's landscape garden and its Palladian bridge below it on the Widcombe slope. Both are a walk from the centre, and Prior Park has no visitor parking apart from a few accessible spaces booked ahead, so go on foot or by bus. The last day of the Cotswold Way, section 15 from Cold Ashton, is the other local walk: 10.2 miles (16.5km), down 400m and up only 225m, over the civil war battlefield on Lansdown, past the hill fort on Little Down and Bath Racecourse to Prospect Stile, where the city appears in the valley, then down through Weston to the abbey. The 31 bus from Lansdown is the way back up to a car.

For a day out by car, take the A46 north to Dyrham Park, the National Trust's William and Mary house in a deer park about 9 miles (15km) from Bath, whose perimeter wall the Cotswold Way follows, then on by the M4 or the A420 to Castle Combe, 15 miles (24km), Biddestone and Lacock, and back by Chippenham. Tetbury, 24 miles (38km), and Westonbirt Arboretum make the longer loop by the A46 and A433. Malmesbury is on the way home. Without a car, the train to Chippenham and the X34 to Lacock is the easy day.

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When to come

Bath is full at Christmas, when the market runs through the centre from Thursday 26 November to Sunday 13 December in 2026, and in May and early June for the Bath Festival (its literature and music festivals ran from 16 May to 7 June in 2026; the 2027 dates are to be confirmed), with Party in the City on 21 and 22 May 2027. Summer weekends and Bath Rugby home days fill the hotels and the park and ride buses. For the Cotswold Way, the fields below Lansdown are at their muddiest from November to March. Roman Baths tickets cost less on a weekday than at a weekend.