Natchez Trace Parkway (Tennessee)

The northern Tennessee reach of the 444-mile Natchez Trace Parkway, an unhurried National Park Service parkway that opens at the cathedral-like Double Arch Bridge over Birdsong Hollow near Franklin.

The Trace is a cruising road, not a driver's road, and judging it by corner count misses the point. This northern segment runs from the parkway's terminus at TN-100 near Pasquo, south of Nashville, through rolling Tennessee farmland and hardwood forest with commercial traffic banned and a 50 mph limit throughout. Its signature is the Double Arch Bridge at Birdsong Hollow, a spandrel-less concrete arch that carries the parkway 145 feet above the valley and has won national design awards; you drive across it almost without realising how high you are until you stop at the overlook below. The pleasure here is the calm, the long sightlines and the well-kept surface, and it makes a fine bookend to the harder mountain roads further east. Mind that the Double Arch Bridge has been closed for construction work into 2027 so check status before relying on it, deer that drift onto the roadway at dawn and dusk, and strict enforcement of the parkway speed limit.