Our fantastic garden volunteers have been working hard - as always - and have recently been clearing and tidying the area at the west end of the Archery Lawn. Beside the stone summer house is a wall made from unusually-shaped stones, including one with barely decipherable writing: “This stone was laid by Mrs. Moulton” and underneath that, even fainter, one can just about read “Bradford Baths October 1897”. This is the foundation stone of Bradford on Avon’s swimming pool and baths, built to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897.

Mr Erlysman Pinckney, Chair of Bradford Urban District Council, declared that a “permanent memento rather than a fleeting jollification” would be appropriate to mark the glorious reign of Queen Victoria. The chief benefactor was John Moulton, Stephen Moulton’s youngest son - and later Alex Moulton’s grandfather. Mrs Moulton - Alice Blanche Moulton - was John’s wife.

Whilst John Moulton had wanted to build a Technical School on the site, the baths were very welcome as very few people had such luxuries in their house at the time. Although the main ‘room’ of the baths was primarily for swimming, the building was designed to be multi-purpose - the changing cubicles could be quickly dismantled and the pool floored over to create a space for dinners and other functions. The School was built a little further south and eventually became Fitzmaurice Grammar School.

Mrs Moulton was presented with a splendid silver cake slice to mark her contribution to the construction of the new swimming baths, and this intricately engraved item survives in the Moulton collection at The Hall. It is the work of local silversmith Charles Hart, whose business still exists (in Frome) to this day. The notably fine baths themselves were demolished, not without anger and regret, in the early 1970s. Bradford’s library, now also containing the Bradford on Avon Museum, was later built on the site.

Today there is scarcely a trace of the baths themselves, but if you look carefully at the iron railings by the river you will see John Moulton’s ‘JM’ monogram atop their uprights; and of course visitors to the gardens at The Hall can find the Foundation Stone. Beside it, making up the rest of the wall, lie weathered stone carvings and parts of stone urns that can only have been salvaged from the main frontage of The Hall itself, substantially re-faced by Stephen Moulton around 1850.

The grounds of The Hall are open throughout the summer - see our Events Calendar for more details and to book tickets.