America's Rural Landscape

The Blue Ridge Parkway showcases some of America’s best rural and natural landscapes, and Rocky Knob is known for its pastoral agricultural countryside. The plateau’s topography differs from much of the Parkway, with rolling land and fertile soil worked by generations of family farms. Today, as in the past, cattle graze and small farms grow cabbage, corn, and hay along the Blue Ridge Parkway, although farm work once done by hand, as in 1953, has been replaced by more contemporary machinery. Nearby, Rock Castle Creek tumbles through a forest of tulip trees, rosebay rhododendron, and umbrella magnolias, creating small waterfalls as it parallels Rock Castle Gorge Trail. Over time, the creek cut the deep gorge visible from the overlook across the Parkway. Chestnuts from the ancient trees that once grew in the gorge were an important food and trade resource for mountain communities, and until the 1930s the gorge was home to Rock Castle, a small agricultural community.

Virginia · United States