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Definition - Mineral water - ground water, which in its natural state contains carbon dioxide and other soluble matter in sufficient concentration to cause effervescence or impart a distinct taste. There are two primary classifications of hot springs :

Filtration hot springs - geothermally heated mineral water that is initially fed by rainwater that seeps into the earth. As it travels into the earth, it becomes subject to increased energy through natural geothermal heat and is exposed to gases and often a wide variety of minerals from rock and mineral deposits. The water adsorbs the minerals via leaching, is heated by the geothermal source, and then returns to the Earth's surface.

Primary hot springs - geothermally heated mineral water, where direct volcanic activity plays a far greater role in the process of the hot springs formation. One of the fundamental physical distinctions between a filtration spring and a primary spring is the mineral and gas content of the water, such as randon and bromide. Primary springs are often powered by magma chambers, which exist under the Earth's surface, as well as in volcanically active regions.

History of The Mineral Bath
Bath owes its name, its history, indeed its very existence, to the hot mineral waters that rise at the King's Spring and two others nearby, never varying in temperature or quantity, producing 500,000 gallons of 120 degree Fahrenheit water per day (that's 6 gallons a second, 360 per minute, 21,000 per hour, and more than 182 million per year) since ... well, a very long time ago indeed.


Prehistoric Bath
The Swineherd Prince: As one of the world's most beautiful and romantic cities, it is fitting that the story of the founding of Bath is a suitably romantic fairytale - which has the added cachet that it may even be true! It's the story of making a silk purse from a sow's ear, of making an exceedingly beautiful and beneficent spa from a steaming, noisome swamp. And it all started with the Swineherd-Prince: Bladud, son of Hudibras (and later on father of King Lear), was exiled from court with a disfiguring skin disease, and (as exiled princes do) became a swineherd. His pigs also contracted a skin complaint, and he noticed that when they wallowed in a foul hot muddy area their skin cleared. No fool, Bladud, quickly started to wallow too. His skin cleared, he returned to court, had numerous adventures that have nothing to do with Bath, and when he became king he built his capital at the site of the miraculous hot mud baths, calling it after himself (Bladud - Bad-Lud or Bath-Waters). It was also known as Caerbrent, or Caer Ennaint - the City of Ointment.

Nineteenth Century Bath
If the 18th was the century of the glitterati, the 19th was altogether less frenetic and superficial, more earnest, solid and dull. But it uncovered and exhibited the long-forgotten Roman Baths, renovated the Abbey, and still attracted painters and writers such as Cox, Turner and Sickert, Jane Austen, Walter Savage Landor and Thomas Carlyle. There was also the proliferation of charitable societies and education, of shops and residential housing for the middle and working classes, and Bath had to deal with the same problem the 20th century faced - how to reconcile the beauty and excellence of the past with the pressing needs of the present. As in the 20th century, a number of mistakes were made, and these resulted in the creation of the 'Old Bath Preservation Society' in 1909.

The railway and the canal system both touched Bath, of course, and it became more residential and industrial than previously, but generally Bath had a rough time financially through most of the 1800s. Therefore the temporary revival of spas, following the fashion on the continent, was of great economic importance. Gone were the days of merely wallowing in and drinking the waters, however. Now to get the benefit, one had to have it atomised or vaporised or sprayed or jetted, or injected into you or given along with electric shocks! There had to be Inhalation, Humage and Spray Rooms, Needle and Sitz Baths. The old baths were totally outmoded, besides being in 'a state of decay', so the Corporation roused itself and presented the city in 1889 with re-designed King's and Queen's Baths and a new suite in Bath Street, and with these came the fashion for grand hotels. It was while making these new baths that the Roman Baths were revealed, and these were given the Victorian's idea of a suitable Romanesque setting with a colonnade and statues.
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