If you’re driving back into Licking County, you may or may not notice it.

Driving east on State Route 161, the usual route towards Granville and the Denison University campus from Easton or the airport, you round the curve past New Albany, cross Beech Road, and then you climb.

It is a long, steady climb — one just subtle enough that you might miss it while going 70 mph or so (if not faster).

If you were on a horse, let alone on foot, trust me: You’d notice that climb. You might even call that steady rise the heights.

We have a Licking Heights school district in this county on the western border, and along State Route 16 or Broad Street there’s a Summit Station, but if you’re from a more mountainous area you’d be forgiven for thinking most of the county is flat, especially the western half of it.

There is a distinct ridge, though, that separates us from Franklin County, and divides the drainages of the South Fork of the Licking River, which rises out of this elevation and runs along the south side of it through Pataskala to Buckeye Lake before turning north towards Newark.

There it will meet Raccoon Creek, the central stream of the Licking River drainage, which runs along the northern edge of this plateau, these relative heights, bending east through Granville and joining the South Fork, starting the Licking River proper on one side of downtown Newark before the North Fork comes down out of Utica and merges at Little Texas with the now due-east flowing river.

But they all find their origin on either side of a nearly nameless ridge, yet memorialized in the term “heights” which was given to that area from our earliest written history.

From New Albany, as you ascend past Mink Road to just short of the perpendicular State Route 310, you gain almost 250 feet of altitude. A prominence just north of State Route 161 is called “Beavers Hill” on some old maps. Continuing towards Granville, you descend over 300 feet winding down past State Route 37 and Alexandria, down into the Raccoon Creek watershed.

If you were walking that stretch, no one would have to tell you you’d crossed the heights. You’d be feeling it. If your horse had pulled up to gasp a few moments pulling your wagon full of goods, you’d be eyeing the slope and wondering how long to rest the poor animal before shaking the reins again. At 70 mph, it all blurs into a level plain broken by a few wooded valleys. 

Yet these details of elevation and drainage shape not only old names for roads and schools — they still mark where runoff and lift stations define how water is supplied, which determine where development will advance. 

Like a long slow steady upslope, it’s subtle until it suddenly isn’t anymore. There can be advantages to noticing the terrain as it is, to see more clearly what it might become.

Jeff Gill is a pastor, a mediator and a freelance writer in Granville, Ohio.