Ohio is not the place you expect to find ancient geometry, but the Hopewell people built it here. Hopeton Earthworks lies on a terrace above the Scioto River just north of Chillicothe, and it is one of the sites listed by UNESCO in 2023 as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. These mounds and enclosures were built roughly two thousand years ago, and the scale is hard to grasp from the ground because many of the walls are low and softened by farm fields and time. The shapes were circles, squares and octagons, set out with a precision that suggests careful planning.
What makes the Hopewell culture interesting is how far it reached. People here exchanged goods across much of eastern North America: obsidian from the Rockies, copper from Lake Superior, mica from the Appalachians, shells from the Gulf coast. The earthworks were not houses or forts. They were ceremonial centres, probably linked to astronomy and funerary rites, and some of them align to lunar cycles in a way that continues to attract research. Nearby Octagon Earthworks in Newark is the best-known example, while Seip and High Bank are other sites in the same family.
The riding here is gentle, rolling and green. Ohio's back roads are straight in the river bottoms and bend a little where they climb onto the ridges, and you ride past farms, corn and soybean fields and small villages with churches and diners. Surfaces are mostly decent, speeds modest, and the main risks are tractors, deer at dusk and the odd gravel patch where a field track meets the road. Late spring and early autumn are best, when the corn is high or the colours are turning.
Chillicothe, about six kilometres away, has about twenty thousand people and everything you need: fuel, food, motels and a historic downtown. It was the first capital of Ohio and the Scioto valley around it is full of old farmhouses and older stories. Take a walk on the grass at the site, read the interpretive panels, and remember that the people who built these walls moved earth in baskets.