Bath and King Bladud

Wild Boar - from Wikipedia under Creative Commons licence (unfortunately the link broke soon after finding it - I will try to find the credit later when the computer is better!)

"The city of Bath has a curious and somewhat comic tradition (which is noticed in its local guide-books), that the old British King Bladud, d. 844 b.c. (father of King Lear or Leal, d. 799 b.c), being reduced by leprosy to the condition of a swine-herd, discovered the medicinal virtues of the hot springs of Bath, while noticing that his pigs which bathed therein were cured of sundry diseases prevailing among them. Warner, one chief writer on the history of Bath, quotes this tradition at large from Wood, a local topographer of the preceding century, who gives it without authority. Warner states that, although the legend may appear absurd, it is noticed and credited by most British antiquaries of antiquity. — N. and Q., 2 S., ix. 45.

The following epigram on the " Bristol Hogs " is by a clergyman of the name of Groves, of Claverton:

When Bladud once espied some Hogs
Lie wallowing in the steaming bogs,
Where issue forth those sulphurous springs,
Since honor'd by more potent Kings,
Vex'd at the brutes alone possessing
What ought t' have been a common blessing,
He drove them thence in mighty wrath,
And built the mighty Town of Bath.
The hogs thus banished by their Prince,
Have liv'd in Bristol ever since."

Hope 1893

Map - Bath

Map - Bristol