Mount Monadnock is the heart of the Monadnock Region. This drive will take you through all of the towns which make up the area. The drive can be done in one day, but you should plan for at least 3 days, as you will want to stop along the way to explore. I designed the 230 mile route so you can start and end in the same town.

Map and driving directions. Click the 2nd icon (looks like a list) to see the driving directions. You can print the route or download it for use with your Garmin or Google Earth.

I went back into some of my older posts and chose an image from each town to give you an idea what you may see…

Peterborough

Jaffrey

Fitzwilliam

Troy

Marlborough

Roxbury

Dublin

Harrisville

Nelson

Sullivan

Gilsum

Surry

Keene

Swanzey

Richmond

Winchester

Hinsdale

Chesterfield

Westmoreland

Walpole

Alstead

Marlow

Stoddard

Sabine Heinlein | Longreads | April 2015 | 16 minutes (3,886 words)

One time, when I was in my early twenties, I shared a hospital room with a mother of many. I had a skin infection that wouldn’t respond to oral medication, and the 50-something-year-old woman had severe, inexplicable hives. Our main topic of conversation revolved around neither of our ailments. It was about my not wanting to have children. She was insistent, which seemed ironic considering her hives flared up whenever her family visited her on Sundays. I eventually compromised with the woman. Okay, I said, I will put off my decision until I reach my thirties. “You are starry-eyed,” she huffed. “You young women want it all. But you can’t have it all!” Maybe, I thought, some of us don’t want it all.

Yesterday, a very kind man asked me to name three things recently that have brought me joy. I was a bit down in the dumps (to put it very, very mildly), it wasn’t an out of the blue question.

I paused.

“My son. My kids. They bring me joy. They’re so funny, if you just listen to them and their funny little ways, the questions they ask, the gratefulness for small things (sometimes), the kids, they laugh so much. They bring me joy.”

He nodded, and gestured for me to carry on.

“And… The day before yesterday I found a tiny white feather on the ground. My son spotted it and said it was a feather from Grandad. He said Grandad left it there for him so he would know he was still with him. He’s four. He’s lost a lot in his short life, he seems to have a…

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) wrote 14 novels, so picking a top ten won’t prove too difficult a task. What are the best Thomas Hardy novels? This is undoubtedly going to prove a difficult and controversial issue, but we thought we’d take this chance to select the ten we think are worth reading – and we’ve even ranked the novels in order (and the order, too, is bound to prove controversial). Do you agree with our ordering and general choices? We’ve included some interesting facts about the novels in each description of the novel.

10. Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). Hardy adopted an overtly pastoral title for this, his second published novel. His first, Desperate Remedies (1871), was an example of sensation fiction (a genre more usually identified with Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins). It didn’t fare particularly well, so Hardy took the title of his next book from a song…