Ancient Earthworks — Serpent Mound & Fort Ancient

Long before Ohio was farmland, the peoples we call the Adena and Hopewell shaped the land itself into monuments of extraordinary scale and precision. This day threads two of the greatest surviving earthworks of ancient North America, both within easy reach of Cincinnati. Fort Ancient, a Hopewell ceremonial enclosure of more than three and a half miles of curving earthen walls above the Little Miami River, is now inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. An hour east, coiled along a ridge above a mysterious cryptoexplosion crater, lies the Great Serpent Mound — at roughly 1,348 feet the largest surviving effigy mound in the world, its head aligned to the summer solstice sunset. Between them, a country lunch in the rolling hills of Adams and Warren County.