Eight rooms, five cabins and an event barn.The Inn and Cabins at Volunteer Gap.

Six land facts sit on the card above and four of them read Ask Lowell. This is a going concern with ground under it, and the record behind it is short.

• An eight-room inn. The photographs show a log lodge behind a long covered porch, and one made-up bedroom.
• Five private cabins, which the aerial shows as small buildings out on open pasture.
• An event barn, photographed from the inside: painted wood floor, string lights overhead.
• 6.6 acres and two ponds, off Volunteer Road near the Blue Ridge Parkway.

That is the whole of the verified description. Room sizes, square footage, build dates, frontage, topography, utilities and restrictions are not in the record we work from, which is why four of the six lines above name Lowell instead of a figure.

Ask for the paperwork early. A property with an operation on it carries a longer diligence list than a bare parcel, and most of that list sits with the seller.

• The operating records the seller will release, and the terms attached to them.
• A written schedule of what conveys: furnishings, equipment, the barn's fittings, the name the place trades under.
• Water and wastewater for the lodge, the cabins and the barn. Utilities read Ask Lowell, so nothing here says whether the buildings sit on public lines or on a well and a septic system. Well and septic permits come from the Carroll County Health Department in Hillsville, (276) 730-3180.
• Any permit or license the operation carries, and what a change of owner does to it. Those answers sit with the issuing agency.
• The recorded plat, the easements and any restrictions on the 6.6 acres. A boundary is a surveyor's work, not ours.

The annotated aerial labels two things beside the boundary: Volunteer Road and the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Parkway passes through the southern portion of Carroll County, and what sits along it is laid out in our guide to Carroll County rather than here. The record gives no distance from this property to it, and no source we hold gives one, so this page prints none. Ask Lowell what the drive is.

The access line on the card reads Volunteer Road, Fancy Gap area, while the mailing address is Hillsville. Fancy Gap is a Carroll County community and one of the county's five magisterial districts rather than a town of its own, so those two lines name parts of the same county rather than two jurisdictions. Which county office holds which part of the file is set out on our page on the six counties we work.