PAUL REES

There are few grander training bases in sport than Bath’s. The club has a 99-year lease at Farleigh House, an 18th-century pile a few miles south of the city surrounded by rolling hills where the soundtrack is birdsong rather than traffic. The grounds are extensive and the club’s new head of rugby Johann van Graan is living in a house on the site until his family join him from South Africa.
Farleigh’s House’s splendour contrasts with the grim reality of Bath’s status as one of the Premiership’s also-rans. The dominant force in the English game in the final decade of the amateur e...