Captain John Smith, military leader of the expedition to Virginia in 1607, who explored and mapped the Chesapeake Bay and the Bay Country, described it thus:
"There is but one entrance by sea into this country, and that is at the mouth of a very goodly Bay, the widenesse whereof is 18 or 20 miles.
"Within is a country ... heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation.... Here are ... hils, plaines, valleys, rivers and brookes all running most pleasantly into a faire Bay compassed but for the mouth with fruitfull and delightsome land...."
"YE NORTHERNE NECK"
On the western shore of the Bay there are three peninsulas, or necks, carved out of Virginia's shoreline by the tidal rivers.
The third, and northernmost, of these peninsulas lies between the Rappahannock and the Potomac Rivers. It was probably referred to orally by the first white men who settled at Jamestown as "the northern neck." The name appeared in print certainly as early as 1677, when in an official document it was mentioned as "ye Northerne Neck."
This third peninsula north lies aloof, and long, between its broad rivers, as they flow into the Chesapeake Bay on the east.
From the Bay the narrow strip of land, only fifteen or twenty miles wide, runs inland between the rivers for almost a hundred miles, until it narrows near Fredericksburg so that the rivers almost join—not quite an island but more cut-off than the usual peninsula. In the old days when there were almost no roads, and no bridges, the Neck was to those living in the eastern portion more like an island than a peninsula. Only from the west could one travel in or out by land and that exit was rarely used.
Its geographical position made the Northern Neck for many years almost as inaccessible as an ancient stronghold surrounded by a moat.