BUXTON , twenty miles north of Ashbourne, was founded in 79 AD by the Romans, who happened upon a spring from which 1500 gallons of pure water gushed every hour at a constant 28°C. So famous did the spring become that Mary, Queen of Scots, was allowed by her captors to come here for treatment of her rheumatism. The spa's heyday came at the end of the eighteenth century with the fifth Duke of Devonshire's grand design to create a northern answer to Bath or Cheltenham, a plan thwarted... [More]