Northampton is the cultural heart of the Pioneer Valley, a college town with an unusually busy centre for a place of twenty-eight thousand. Smith College, founded in 1871, sets the tone with its old brick halls, gardens and a campus that spills into the streets, and the town around it has a taste for bookshops, music venues, vegetarian restaurants and independent cinemas. It has a long-standing reputation as one of the most liberal places in New England, with a large lesbian community and a strong tradition of dissent, and the locals say it with a certain pride.
History runs deep too. Jonathan Edwards, the preacher who helped set off the Great Awakening, held forth in a church here in the 1730s, and Calvin Coolidge arrived as a young lawyer, served as mayor, and went on to become president. His house still stands, and the Coolidge Bridge that carries Route 9 over the Connecticut River bears his name. The river here is broad and slow, with farmland along its banks, and Mount Holyoke rises to the south, an unbroken ridge from which Thomas Cole painted his famous view of the oxbow bend in 1836.
The valley floor is one of the most fertile in the region, which is why Hadley, just across the river, grows so many acres of asparagus. In late spring the farm stands sell it still warm from the field, and later in the year there are pumpkins, apples and sweet corn. Riders who like quiet roads will find them along River Road and through the flat country around Hatfield, where tobacco barns with slatted sides stand in the fields.
From Northampton, Route 9 climbs west into the hill towns of Williamsburg, Goshen and Cummington, a landscape of old farms, small villages and winding, patched lanes with stone walls and mossy bridges. These roads twist and rise with little warning, and are perfect for an unhurried day, though the surface can be rough after winter and there are deer everywhere.
Fuel stations and every kind of food are easy in Northampton, with a big appetite for coffee and craft beer. Autumn is the star season, and winter brings icy conditions to the high roads.