Pioneer Valley and Hilltowns

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Northampton

   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.

   Read the complete Northampton write-up.

2. 2. Lempster

3. 3. Deerfield

   It is a lovely, wooded corner of the state, and Littleton, a small mill-turned-tourist town of about four thousand people, lies fifteen kilometres to the northwest, with Whitefield a little farther off. Fuel and food are in those towns.

   Read the complete Deerfield write-up.

4. 4. Newport

   Newport is the county seat of Sullivan County, which gives a town of under five thousand people a handsome courthouse and a surprisingly grand common. The Sugar River runs through the middle of it, and the old mill buildings that line the water tell you where the money came from a century and a half ago. Today the town works as a service centre for the surrounding hill country, a place where locals buy their hardware and their pizza and where a rider can do the same.

   Read the complete Newport write-up.

5. 5. Shelburne Falls

   Shelburne Falls is really two villages, Shelburne on one side of the Deerfield River and Buckland on the other, tied together by an iron bridge and a curious flower garden. The garden is on a former trolley bridge, a concrete arch built in 1908 for an electric railway that closed in the 1920s. Local women planted it in 1929, and the Bridge of Flowers now blooms from spring bulbs through the autumn, a long ribbon of colour over the river. It is a true village, with about two thousand people, some pottery and glass studios, a good bakery and a couple of cafes, and the whole thing is small enough to walk in an hour.

   Read the complete Shelburne Falls write-up.

6. 6. Ashfield

   Ashfield is the sort of Massachusetts hill town where the main street has a general store, a library, a town hall and a lake, and little else, and nobody sees a problem with that. It sits in the Hilltowns west of the Connecticut River, in the rolling country of Franklin County, with the Pioneer Valley down to the east and the Berkshires beginning to stack up to the west. About eighteen hundred people live here, and most of the road network around them is wooded, twisting and quiet.

   Read the complete Ashfield write-up.

7. 7. Williamsburg

8. 8. Back to Northampton

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Northampton write-up.