Swainswick

Swainswick is a small village and civil parish, northeast of Bath, on the A46 in the Bath and North East Somerset unitary authority, Somerset, England. The parish has a population of 265. The village name was also spelled Sweyneswik and Sweyneswick in the early 13th to 14th Century.

==History== Bladud or Blaiddyd was a mythical king of the Britons, for whose existence there is little historical evidence, but legend holds that he returned to Britain from Athens with leprosy and was imprisoned as a result, but escaped and went into hiding. He found employment as a swineherd at Swainswick and noticed that his pigs would go into an alder-moor in cold weather and return covered in black mud. He found that the mud was warm and that they did it to enjoy the heat. He also noticed that the pigs which did this did not suffer from skin diseases as others did. On trying the mud bath himself, he found that he was cured of his leprosy.