Lydiard Tregoze, Wiltshire

For vigour

What’s this, in the park of the 18th-century house of Lydiard Tregoze, near Swindon? Not a sheep wash. Certainly not something for cleaning mud off the wheels of carts. It is, I’m reliably informed by the adjacent interpretation board, a plunge pool for humans, and it dates to about 1820, when Sir George Richard St John was Lord of the Manor. Although by this time the technology for piped water certainly existed, most country houses did not have such a convenience. What did the upper classes need piped water for, when they had a large staff of servants to bring the stuff to where it was needed? So water for washing and bathing was brought to your room by hand, and most country-house owners were happy with this arrangement.

Some houses, however, had plunge pools, either out in the open like this, or undercover in an outbuilding. Plunge pools, as the name suggests, were not for wallowing. The idea was to plunge in and out quickly and the reason for doing this was not primarily for washing, but because a dunking in cold water was deemed to be good for your health. Some went to Bath or other health resorts, some, increasingly, went to the coast to bathe in salt water, but many held that immersion in fresh water – here supplied from the nearby lake – was just as good. Madness, rickets, leprosy and asthma were among the disorders said in the Regency period to be helped by a course of plunge-pool treatments. Maybe some bathers thought that a daily dash down to the plunge pool and back would bring them increased vigour, in the same way as a cold morning bath at boarding school was supposed to do.

So it was perhaps a case of going down the steps as quickly as you could manage, ducking in a few times, and then dashing back up the steps – even faster, and shivering no doubt – and rushing indoors to be dried. Invigorating? I hope so.