Fairview has no strip of attractions, no downtown to walk, and nothing that announces itself from the highway. What there is to do here is mostly outdoors, mostly free and mostly seasonal, which means a newcomer can live here for a year and still think there is nothing to do. There is. It is just not signposted.

Here it is, sorted by the kind of day you have rather than by what sort of facility it is.

A few places to start

If you do one thing, do the park

Bowie Nature Park is the answer to most of this question. It runs to 722 acres off Bowie Lake Road, with about 17 miles of trail through forest, grassland and wetland, and the city reckons few parks under municipal management anywhere in Tennessee are larger. The gates open at 5am and close at 10pm, every day of the year.

The trails take walkers, runners, mountain bikes and horses. There are lakes you can fish, a playground, and a nature center with animals and exhibits, which is also where the trail maps live — Monday to Saturday 8am to 4pm, Sunday 9am to noon.

One piece of local knowledge that will save you a wasted trip: after heavy rain, the trails close to bikes and horses while the ground is soft, even though they stay open to walkers. Call (615) 799-5544 before you load a horse or a bike into a trailer. Nobody tells you this until you have driven out there once.

The park is the thing people who move here end up organizing their weekends around, and it is worth understanding it was made rather than found. The land was worn-out, eroded farm ground when Dr. Evangeline Bowie started planting it back in the middle of the last century. The forest you are walking through is roughly eighty years old and entirely deliberate.

Before visiting, use the park's trail maps and downloads, shelter reservation information and program calendar.