Tirur town

The rare Garuda shrine in the Triprangode temple landscape near Tirur, visited as a living place of worship with local ritual rules respected.

An ancient Vishnu temple on the Bharathapuzha at Thirunavaya, near the historic Mamankam fair-ground and a major venue for ancestral (bali/shraddha) rites.

The Alathiyur Perumthrikkovil near Tirur, where the sanctum holds Sri Rama alone and the Hanuman carved outside it — leaning, caught in the act of listening to his orders — is the figure the crowds come for.

One of the hundred and eight Shiva temples of Kerala, a kilometre from Thunchan Parambu — an apsidal ninth-century shrine that opens at half past two in the morning because the god here was installed at dusk.

A west-facing Shiva temple south of Tirur, nine shrines inside six acres, built around the moment Shiva came out of the linga to stop Death taking the boy Markandeya.

Tirur's town hall, built as a full-size railway goods wagon in signal red and lettered MSM LV 1711 — the memorial to the hundred prisoners shut into wagon 1711 at the station down the road on 19 November 1921.

The state university at Vakkad, four kilometres west of Thunchan Parambu, founded in 2012 to teach the humanities and social sciences through Malayalam rather than English.

At Tirur, the ground of Thunchath Ezhuthachan, the “father of the Malayalam language” — a working literary institution with a museum, a manuscript library and the Vidyarambham first-letters tradition at Vijayadashami.