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Welcoming more than three million visitors each year, Clay County is centrally located for day trips from Nashville, Knoxville and Bowling Green, Kentucky. Looking for lake recreation in Tennessee? Here’s where to find it—and how to spend a weekend on Dale Hollow Lake.

With 620 miles of shoreline and 27,000 acres of lake, Clay County is located on the western end of the newly designated Cumberland National Scenic Byway. This 156-mile route traces some of the earliest paths traveled by European settlers and was beaten into a well-worn trail by Indigenous People in the centuries prior. The eastern end of the byway is Cumberland Gap and the Cumberland Gap National Historic Park and the byway also passes through Historic Rugby, a Victorian English Settlement in Morgan County.

To many, this region of Tennessee and Kentucky is best known for world-class smallmouth bass fishing, river trout, crappie, bream, muskie, walleye and catfish. It’s also among the cleanest reservoirs, making it prime real estate for water sports like skiing, swimming, kayaking and wakeboarding. Dale Hollow Lake even has scuba diving thanks to the ruins of an old, submerged schoolhouse, Willow Grove School, that was flooded along with the community during the creation of this TVA reservoir.

Day 1 Celina’s Downtown

Celina, the town anchor for Dale Hollow Lake, is the only incorporated city in Clay County and your starting point for exploring the region hugging the Tennessee-Kentucky state line.

Day 2 Tour the Historic Clay County courthouse

For a glimpse into Clay County history, the 150-year-old courthouse is your first stop; the brick building is mostly unaltered from when it was built in 1873. It was turned over to local historians and now houses the Rolley Hole Museum honoring the marble-centric series of games that weaves in elements of golf, croquet and billiards and is unique to the area through interpretive displays.

Day 3 Visit the fish hatchery

The National Fish Hatchery in Celina is located beneath the monstrous dam, which was impounded in 1943 to create the reservoir, at the western tail of the Obey River. The hatchery is responsible for rearing and releasing fish across a wide area of the entire state, and a visit is a fun activity for kids as well as their parents. Conveniently, the boat ramp beneath the dam is the ideal spot to put in your fishing rods and lazily float or motorboat to the confluence of the Cumberland River while hunting for rainbow and brown trout.