Lock Heart: how a Scottish planter’s name became a heart-shaped lake

If you have read anything about trekking Chokramudi in the last year, you have probably read this sentence, or a version of it: the trekking pass is collected from the forest department office near the Devikulam Heart Lake viewpoint, around 22 kilometres from Munnar on the Kochi–Dhanushkodi highway. It comes from Onmanorama’s May 2025 guide and it has been copied widely since.

It will take you to the wrong place. The forest entry office, the counter, the permit gate and the trailhead are all at Gap Road, 13.2 km from Munnar. So where did the other version come from?

The name on the ground

The pass is Lockhart Gap, named for the Lockhart tea estate on the northern shoulder of Chokramudi, itself named for a planter of the concession era. In local Malayalam usage that has long since been absorbed as two words — Lock Heart. This is not a guess: OpenStreetMap has the streams at the foot of this hill mapped as “Lock Heart bhagam thodu” and “Lock Heart Puthukkad”, and the water tanks on the estate as “Lock heart lower Division Water Tank”. Wikimedia Commons files the photographs of the pass under “Lock Heart Gap, Munnar”.

From “Lock Heart Gap” to “Heart Lake viewpoint” is one sub-editor and one plausible assumption. Google itself has absorbed the association: search its maps for “Heart shaped lake view point Munnar” and the first result is Lockhart Gap View, at the trailhead. There is no lake at Lockhart Gap. There is a pass, a lay-by, a bus stop and a very long view east.

Except that there is a heart-shaped lake

Here is the part that makes the error stick. Drive on east from the gap and, at 9.7 km, you reach the Anayirangal viewpoint, where the Anayirankal reservoir lies below the road in a shape people have been calling heart-shaped for years. By road that viewpoint is 22.8 km from Munnar town — which is, to within a kilometre, exactly the “around 22 kilometres” in the sentence. Two real landmarks, nine kilometres apart, welded into one direction.

And two viewpoints called Lockhart

There is a second confusion on the same stretch of road, and it can cost visitors a morning. The lay-by at the actual mountain pass contains the trekking counter. A busier lay-by 1.7 km east, with stalls and parked coaches, is signed “Lockhart Gap Road View Point”. If somebody tells you to meet at the Lockhart Gap viewpoint, establish which one they mean before setting off.