Sport on the Nilgiris and in Wynaad . h face, to which the Ghatforest (which ends here) clings up to the very have seen it remarked somewhere that blessed isthe country without a history, and if this be true,then the Wynaad is blessed indeed. Most tracts inSouthern India have been the scene of successivestruggles for sovereignty : kings have come and kingshave gone, leaving behind them monuments andwritings and inscriptions which, when pieced togetherby the modern epigraphist, yield a more or lessaccurate history of the past. But the Wynaad is notof these. Isolated by the mighty barri
Sport on the Nilgiris and in Wynaad . h face, to which the Ghatforest (which ends here) clings up to the very have seen it remarked somewhere that blessed isthe country without a history, and if this be true,then the Wynaad is blessed indeed. Most tracts inSouthern India have been the scene of successivestruggles for sovereignty : kings have come and kingshave gone, leaving behind them monuments andwritings and inscriptions which, when pieced togetherby the modern epigraphist, yield a more or lessaccurate history of the past. But the Wynaad is notof these. Isolated by the mighty barrier of the Ghats ;encircled by a belt of malarious jungle—to traversewhich was held, even in quite recent times, to bemerely courting death ; itself a plateau clothed withprimeval forest inhabited only (as Ferreira wrote) byelephants and tigers, and by savage junglemen whowere accounted only one degree less dangerous thanthe wild beasts, it offered no attraction to the there are no relics of the past to tell its THE WYNAAD 31 That at one period South-East Wynaad had a resi-dent Rajah or Chief, is evident from the remains of apalace or fort on the eastern slope of RockwoodPeak. The present Woodbriar bungalow is built inpart of bricks taken from this old ruin. Over the crest,on my side of the ridge, the top of a conical hill hasbeen terraced, and this presumably was the site of alarge village connected with the kovilagom on theWoodbriar property. Across the valley, at thesummit of the hill above Emerald Estate, there arealso traces of a levelled site and a ditch, where perhapsanother fort once stood. But these slight remains of aformer occupation afford not the slenderest clue as towho these men were, when or whence they came,when or why they departed. Save these few buildingsites, the only evidences that this part of the countrywas once inhabited by a bygone race are the old goldworkings round Devala and Pundalur. Here, again,there is nothing to serve as a
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