Nelliyampathy is a drive. The walking is somewhere else

Nelliyampathy is sold as a hill station and visited as a drive. You come up from Nenmara past the Pothundy dam, you stop at a railing at Seetharkundu, you stop at another one at Kaikatty where there is a shelter and a place to park, and you go back down. That is a perfectly good day and it is not what this page is about. The walking at Nelliyampathy is a separate activity, on separate ground, with separate rules, and almost nobody does it.

Three routes the district lists by name

Palakkad district publishes three trekking routes for these hills and gives a distance for each: Hill Top by way of Lilli at six kilometres, Karassuri near Anamada at thirteen, and a crossing to Parambikulam at twenty. All three carry the same note — subject to permission from the Forest Division. This is Nemmara division ground, and the far end of the longest route is the Parambikulam Tiger Reserve, which is a different protected area with its own entry rules.

That note is not a formality. Elephants move through these hills, and the commonest reason a planned walk at Nelliyampathy does not happen is that the division has closed a route because animals are on it.

The one walk anybody can do

Kesavan Para is the exception, and it is the one to start with. It is about four and a half kilometres from the settlement by road, and the path in is red earth under a closed evergreen canopy, climbing steadily with the light coming down green through the leaves. It opens without warning onto an enormous sheet of bare granite tilted out over the valley. In the mornings the cloud comes up the slope and over the lip of it. Take a guide even for this one: it is short, but nothing on this range is waymarked.

Manpara, and the church nobody maintains

Manpara — also called Raja’s Cliff — is one of the high points of the range, and the usual way up is not on foot. It is about two hours in a semi-open four-wheel-drive over broken track, generally from Palagapandy, with a steep jungle path as the alternative for people who would rather walk it. From the top the whole Palakkad range is laid out. Standing alone on a rock nearby is Victoria Church, a roofless chapel from the planting era, and it is the only building on any of these routes.

The packaged version

The Kerala Forest Development Corporation runs the only organised trip here. Its Nelliyampathy programme is two thousand rupees a person and puts together a trek to Pothumala and Seetharkundu, a jeep safari to Pakuthipalam, a night in a forest lodge and food. It runs November to the end of May and is booked through the corporation’s divisional office at Thrissur rather than at any counter on the hill.

What is actually underfoot

Above about a thousand metres the range breaks into bald granite domes with dry grass on their shoulders and evergreen shola packed into the folds between them, and the plantations run right up to the edge of it. A single hour’s walk can cross private estate, reserve forest and open rock. That mixture is the whole character of the place and it is also why permission matters: which rules apply depends entirely on whose ground you are standing on.