Roads do not get built up mountains because the view is good. They get built because something at the top or on the way up is worth moving, and somebody can pay for it. At Ponmudi that something was first coffee, then tea, and the paperwork is unusually specific about it.
Coffee, and then the rust
The slopes here were opened for commercial planting from the 1860s. The estate was reportedly bought by a British planter, Richard Arther Moore, from the King of Travancore in 1860 — a transaction that neatly captures the arrangement in a princely state, where the land was the ruler’s to sell and the capital was European.
The first crop was coffee, and it failed. Coffee leaf rust swept the region from the 1860s onward and ruined the early plantings across southern India and Ceylon alike. It is one of the great agricultural disasters of the century and it is the reason the hills of southern India are covered in tea rather than coffee today: planters did not choose tea so much as retreat into it.
The dates that are firm
Tea was planted at Ponmudi in 1884. In 1900 the Ponmudi Tea and Rubber Company Ltd was formed to work the property, which consisted of three estates — Ponmudi, Bon-Accord and Braemore — all of them, as the record puts it, in the native state of Travancore.
The scale is recorded too: 3,276 acres in total, of which 1,710 acres were under cultivation in tea and rubber. Rather less than the whole, which is normal for Ghats estates, where a good deal of any holding is too steep, too wet or too rocky to plant and stays as forest by default.
The two non-Ponmudi names are worth a moment. Bon-Accord is the motto and byword of Aberdeen; Braemore is Scottish too. Scottish naming on southern Indian tea estates is close to a rule rather than a coincidence — the planting workforce at management level was heavily Scottish, and they named the ground after home with very little imagination and a great deal of consistency.
What the estates left behind
The physical legacy is the road and the paths. The ghat road above Kallar was laid to move crop, labour and supplies, not tourists, and the estate tracks that now serve as trekking routes on the lower slopes were cut for the same reason. This is why the walking here has the character it does: businesslike gradients, alignments that ignore the scenery, and a network that makes sense only if you know it was once a workplace.
It is also why the hill station and the plantation are so easily confused. They arrived within a few decades of each other, they used the same road, and the buildings of both are plain and weathered. But they had different owners and different purposes: the rest houses at the top were Travancore’s, built for the royal family, while the slopes below were a commercial planting operation with British capital in it. Collapsing the two into "a British hill station" — as most descriptions do, and as this site once did — loses that distinction entirely.
Braemore comes back
The name has resurfaced in an unexpected place. The long-discussed cable car proposal for this hill runs from Ponmudi down to a base station at Braemore — usually rendered Breimore in the modern paperwork, which is why the connection is easy to miss.
The project was announced by the Kerala government in 2017, listed under the central Parvatmala scheme in 2023, and as of 2025 was still at the feasibility stage with a preliminary allocation of ₹50 lakh for studies and no construction begun. Whether it is ever built is anybody’s guess; ropeway proposals in the Ghats have a long history of not being.
But the choice of terminal is not arbitrary, and it is a nice piece of continuity. The place where a twenty-first-century scheme would put the bottom of a cable car is the same place a nineteenth-century company put the bottom of an estate — because it is where the flat ground meets the steep ground, which is the only thing the hill has ever really had to say about where things should go.