Kottancheri Hills trek

Nothing about the visit is bought. There is no gate, no counter, no tariff board and no marked path, because this is reserved forest and none of that was ever built here. What the state asks for instead is permission, arranged with the Kasaragod range office before you set out, and a guide to walk with. Plan a full day, drive to Konnakad rather than to Panathady, and expect the last stretch of road to end in a dirt track above the village.

The story of Kottancheri Hills trek

The approach is the first honest thing to say about Kottancheri, because it is longer than the guidebooks make it sound. Kerala Tourism puts the hills thirty kilometres north-east of Kanhangad, and thirty kilometres is right — as the crow flies. On the ground the drive is fifty-one, because the road has to go around the hills rather than through them, out along the coast and back inland on the Hill Highway through Malom. Konnakad, the village the walk starts from, sits four kilometres east of Malom in Balal panchayat, and from there the last stretch climbs to Vazhathattu, where the tar stops.

What you drive through on the way is not wilderness, and the contrast is worth noticing before it disappears behind you. The Hill Highway runs through rubber — sheet rubber drying under porches, tapping cups on the trunks, the smell of it in the air after rain. Read the place names as you pass them and half of them end in the word Colony: Balal Colony, Neelachal Colony, Kundappally Colony, Vazhathattu Colony, and a Scheduled Tribe colony at Peruthady. Then the tar narrows, the last houses stop, and the canopy starts. There is no buffer between the two, and the people who farm the last plot before the trees are the ones who lose a night’s sleep when the elephants come down. That is a different relationship with this place than a visitor’s.

The four hills are what you have come for, and they are not interchangeable. Kumban mala is the one people climb for the view, and the view has an oddity in it: a stone wall runs along the top, and it is the line between two states. Stand on it and Kodagu — Coorg — opens out in front of you in Karnataka while Kasaragod falls away behind. Pannyar mala is the flat-topped ridge with the grass cap that shows in almost every photograph taken from the valley, a long green table above a wall of forest.

Between the hills the ground is close, wet and dark. The photographic record of these woods is unusually good for a place nobody writes about — one naturalist walked the ridges above Konnakad on a single day in October 2025 and left more than seventy pictures of it, and what they show is not scenery. They show giant ferns with fronds taller than a person, brackets stepping down a rotting log, balsams in flower on the cut banks, streams running clear over rock, and the canopy closing so completely overhead that the sky appears in almost none of the frames.

What grows here is the reason a botanist would make this trip and a landscape photographer would not. Anaphyllum wightii lifts a single dark maroon hood straight out of the leaf litter; it is an arum of the southern Western Ghats, it is listed as threatened, and it grows nowhere else in the world. Angiopteris, the giant fern, throws fronds taller than the person standing beside them. There is Strobilanthes on the banks — the genus that turns whole hillsides of the Ghats blue once every twelve years — and balsams, and begonias, and wild pepper growing through the leaf mould as a weed, which in a country whose entire early trade with the Mediterranean was built on that plant is a quietly extraordinary thing to walk past. The shieldtails are here too: burrowing snakes, blue-black and iridescent with a line of yellow down each flank, a Western Ghats group so seldom seen that several of its species are known from a handful of specimens.

One of those frames is of a kaavu. Sacred groves are the old religion of north Malabar — patches of woodland left standing because they belong to a deity rather than to anyone — and there is one up here: a buttressed tree with a ring of laterite stones at its foot, an iron trident planted in front of it, and a mossed laterite platform cut into the slope nearby. Nothing is published about which deity it belongs to or who keeps it, and we are not going to invent one. It is simply there, in the middle of all that green, and it is the clearest sign you will get that these hills were not empty before they were a trekking route.

The animals are the reason the Forest Department cares who walks here. Elephants use these slopes and cross the farmed ground below them, which is a problem for the villages long before it is an experience for anybody else — the department names them first in its own account of the hills, ahead of everything else that lives in them. That is why permission here is a real permission and not a formality, and why nobody sensible walks in without a guard who knows where the herds have been this week.

Konnakad itself will take about four minutes to look at, and it is worth knowing precisely what is in it before you rely on anything. Inside a kilometre and a half of the junction the map holds a primary health centre, a government veterinary hospital, the Karimbil Kunchikoman Memorial public library, and an Akshaya centre — one of the state’s e-governance kiosks, and the one place here you can count on for an internet connection. It holds no hotel, no restaurant and no fuel pump. That is not the same as saying there is nowhere to buy a bottle of water; small shops are simply not mapped in villages this size, and we are not going to promise you one we have not seen. The nearest stays and eating places we hold verified records for sit around Ranipuram and Rajapuram, half an hour off in the other direction. So the practical shape of the day is: sleep somewhere else, arrive early, carry everything in, and drive back out. Treat the village as the last point at which anything can be arranged rather than as a base.

The other thing the map shows about Konnakad is water, and it explains the walking. Three separate streams here are simply labelled Konnakad, and the Irrigation Department has a check dam on the Chamakkulam thodu at the edge of the village — a thodu being the ordinary Malayalam word for the kind of stream that runs hard in the rains and is a bed of stones in March. Multiply that by the whole hillside above and you have the reason the ground underfoot is what it is: this is not a dry ridge you climb, it is a catchment you cross, and how many times you get your boots wet depends entirely on the month.

The elephants are not an attraction here and it would be dishonest to sell them as one. Kasaragod’s hill villages live with crop raiding — elephants and wild boar coming down out of the reserve into the farmed ground at the forest edge — and the village of Maloth, which Konnakad belongs to, records it as a serious problem for the families whose plots run up against the trees. That is the same herd movement a visitor is being protected from by being told to take a guide, and it is the reason the department would rather know who is in there. If you meet anybody on the way up who farms the last field before the canopy, the elephants are not a story to them.

Stand on the ridge and you are on a divide, which is the most interesting thing about where these hills are. The streams you have been stepping over all morning gather into the Tejaswini — the Kariangode, the second largest river in Kasaragod — which runs sixty-four kilometres west and reaches the Arabian Sea at Nileshwar, the town whose railway station you probably arrived at. Twenty of those kilometres are rafted. On the other side of the same watershed, a few hours’ walk east and over the state line, the water goes the other way: into the Kaveri, and eventually across the whole peninsula to the Bay of Bengal. Two seas, one ridge, and no sign anywhere to tell you that you are standing on the line between them.

There is one more thing the state’s pages say about Kottancheri that is easy to misread. Eleven kilometres of unbroken green, they write, lie between these hills and Talakaveri — the spring in the Brahmagiri range where the Kaveri rises. That is a true statement about geography and a bad idea as an itinerary. Talakaveri is in Karnataka, inside its own protected forest, and walking to it means crossing a state line and needing that state’s permission as well as Kerala’s. Take the eleven kilometres as a description of where you are standing, not as a route somebody has cleared for you.

Legend & myth

The name is the story here. Kotta is a fort in Malayalam, and the four hills — Kottancheri mala, Kumban mala, Pannyar mala and Kanthanppara — are said to stand in the shape of one, a rampart of high ground closing a piece of country off. It is the sort of etymology that turns out to be visible: from the valley floor at Konnakad the ridges do wall the eastern sky.

The other names on the ring are worth saying aloud, because Malayalam does not waste them. Mala is simply a hill, and it is the ending on three of the four — Kottancheri mala, Kumban mala, Pannyar mala. Para, the ending on Kanthanppara, is a rock: the bare stone kind, not the wooded kind, and it is the same word that names outcrops all over Kerala. So the ring reads, in its own language, as three hills and a rock — which is a more accurate description of what you are looking at than anything a map will give you.

The kaavu up here belongs to a much older layer of the same idea. Across Kannur and Kasaragod, a kaavu is a grove that was never cleared because a deity is held to live in it, and the trees standing in one are frequently the oldest for miles in any direction — the botany is a by-product of the belief. The grove up here has its stones, its trident and its platform, and it has no published name, no recorded festival and no account of its origin that we could find in English or Malayalam. That silence is normal for a small kaavu and it is more honest than a legend would be.