Places to Visit in Valathi

Three hills, thirteen kilometres of wall and a rock so sheer that Shivaji called it the most impregnable fortress in India — this is the tale of Gingee.

From Gingee, the “Troy of the East”, to the Danish walls of Dansborg — how Tamil Nadu’s hill citadels and coastal castles trace the making of a colonial empire.

Two days linking one of India’s largest temples and its holiest hill with the sprawling granite fortress the British called the Troy of the East.

A fierce guardian mother, a burning ground, and the night lakhs of devotees come to ‘loot the graveyard’.

On a once-barren plateau inland from the East Coast Road, an experimental township founded in 1968 gathers people from many nations around a golden sphere built for silence.

On a low rock outside a farming village near Gingee, a 7th-century Pallava king boasted that he had built a temple without brick, timber, metal or mortar — and quietly launched a revolution in stone.