Katary Falls

A boarding institution on a 220-acre campus on the southern slope of the valley, whose own school dates itself to 1914. It began as St. George's Homes, an orphanage founded by John Breeden with money given by the Glasgow-born draper Robert Laidlaw, and the published record of when it reached Ketti does not agree with itself — the school says 1914 and the standard reference account says the institution moved here from Kodaikanal in 1922, and we have found no source that settles the gap. The naturalist M. A. Wynter-Blyth was headmaster from 1941. Its boarding cottages still carry the English names they were given — Oldham, Hesketh, Lancashire, Lewis, Oakshott.

The reserved forest on the slope south of the village, between the valley floor and the ridge the boarding schools stand on. It is what is left of the shola-and-grassland cover that the valley has otherwise been cleared of for tea, vegetables and building. It is a reserved forest rather than a park: there is no gate, no ticket and no laid-out path, and it is looked at from the road rather than entered.

A self-financing engineering college founded in 1998 by the Coimbatore Diocesan Council of the Church of South India, approved by AICTE and affiliated to Anna University. It sits on the valley floor below the Ooty road and is the long red-roofed block visible from the viewpoint. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam addressed its students here on 21 February 2012.

The next halt up the mountain line from Wellington and the reason there is a factory town in this valley at all: Aruvankadu was chosen in 1898 for the Cordite Factory because making cordite needs a cool climate, nitroglycerine freezing at forty degrees Fahrenheit. The station serves a township that the Nilgiris district administration counts alongside Wellington Cantonment as one of its two local bodies outside the panchayat system, and the factory itself is a defence installation you look at from the road and no closer.

India's first smokeless propellant factory, opened on 19 January 1904 and still an ordnance factory today, three and a half kilometres up the valley from Wellington station. Captain Babington was sent to find a site in 1898 and chose about 350 acres here for a reason that is pure Nilgiris — cordite has to be made in a cool climate, because nitroglycerine freezes at forty degrees Fahrenheit — and the Kateri hydroelectric dams of 1902 and 1916 were built to power it. It is a prohibited place within the meaning of the Official Secrets Act: you see the township, the school and the gate from the road, and you photograph none of it.

The needle works the village is known for, on the valley floor 1.2 km east of the station, with further plants at Yellanahalli under the Pony Needle name. It is the largest industrial employer in the valley and, with the tea and the vegetable terraces, one of the reasons Ketti is a working village rather than a viewpoint. It is a factory and not a visitor attraction: there is no tour, no gate open to the public and, so far as any picture index reaches, no photograph of it.

The Catholic church at Shanthoor, the settlement at the lowest point of the Ketti valley, 2.8 km from the station. Christian missions were active in this valley from the early 1900s and the schools, colleges and churches strung along the slope — this one, the Needle Church by the works, the CSI institutions above — are what that left behind. Shanthoor has the valley's own post office.

Station code KXT, an NSG-6 halt on the Nilgiri Mountain Railway in the Salem division of Southern Railway, and part of the Mountain Railways of India World Heritage Site. The Udhagamandalam passenger stops here on its way up from Coonoor, and the platform sits directly beside the village road, which is why the station building — orange walls, red tile, a board reading Ketti in Tamil, Hindi and English — is the one piece of Ketti most visitors actually see.

A Hethai Amman shrine in the village, the characteristic place of worship of the Badaga, who are the valley's largest community and whose language is the one most spoken in Ketti. Hethai Amman is the Badaga mother goddess and her festival falls in the cold months around December and January. It is a living village shrine and not a monument, and it is entered on the community's terms.

The barracks quarter on the far side of the stream from the market, begun in 1852 and finished in 1860, called Wellington Barracks for a century and renamed Srinagesh Barracks after General S. M. Srinagesh, the first Indian Colonel of the Madras Regiment. The Cantonment Board still governs the whole 1,647-acre town from here under the Ministry of Defence, which is why Wellington has a board and seven wards rather than a municipality and a mayor.

The bridge that separates the barracks from the bazaar, first thrown across the Mynala stream in 1878 as the Waterloo Bridge and known for a century as the Black Bridge because it was built of Burmese teak and painted black. It was rebuilt in March 2009 — forty-three and a half metres of it — and renamed for Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, who died at the Military Hospital here on 27 June 2008.

The cantonment's own halt on the Nilgiri Mountain Railway, and the point every distance on the Wellington page is measured from, because the town has no bus stand at all. It sits above the rack: the toothed third rail that hauls the train up the gorge ends at Coonoor, so everything through this single platform runs on plain track, and the station opened in 1908 with the extension to Udhagamandalam rather than with the line itself in 1899 — the barracks below it were forty-eight years old before the train arrived.