Sandy Hook barely registers as a town, yet it is the county seat of Elliott County, one of the smallest and most rural in Kentucky, and the courthouse square is about the whole of its centre. A few hundred people live here in the valley of the Little Sandy River, surrounded by ridges of second-growth forest, tobacco barns going grey with age and small farms scraped out of whatever flat land the hollows allow.
Music people know the name. Keith Whitley, the country singer with the aching voice, grew up here, and the town has honoured him with a memorial and a stretch of highway in his name. It fits the place: this is a corner of Appalachia where bluegrass and gospel were sung on porches long before anyone recorded them. Elliott County was also, for well over a century, famous among political watchers as one of the most unswervingly Democratic counties in the country, a loyalty rooted in Civil War and New Deal memories that only broke in recent years.
For riding, the roads around Sandy Hook are the reason to come. Route 7 runs north toward Grayson Lake, where the water lies in a sandstone gorge with cliffs dropping straight into it, and Route 32 heads west toward Morehead and east toward Louisa through a run of bends that follow the creeks. The surface is usually decent but patched, with tar snakes that turn greasy on a hot afternoon, and there is very little traffic beyond local trucks. The hills are not high, but the roads squeeze through them in tight, blind turns, and a dog or a loose cow in the road is part of the experience.
Services are minimal. There is a small store and a place to buy fuel, but do not count on late hours, and the nearest town with a real choice of gas, food and lodging is Morehead, about half an hour west. West Liberty, to the south, is smaller but has the basics. Pack water in summer, because the humidity in these hollows can be heavy, and plan to be out of the deep valleys before dark, when the deer come down to the roadsides and the fog starts to gather.