History of Munnar

The tradition that Col Arthur Wellesley, later to be the Duke of Wellington, leading a British
detachment from Vandiperiyar to Bodinayakanur, then over the High Range and into the Coimbatore
plains to cut off Tippu Sultan's retreat from Travancore, was the first Englishman in the High Range
appears to be belied by the dates involved. If the story is a dozen years too early for Wellesley, it is
quite possible that some other officer in General Meadow's Army may have had that distinction.
Unfortunately, no record of that pioneering mountain crossing has been traced. What is available is a
record of the surveying of this terrain in 1816-17 by Lt Benjamin Swayne Ward, son of Col Francis
Swayne Ward to whom we owe many of the early views of Madras and South India Now available in
lithprints.
Ward and his assistant Lt Eyre Connor were on orders to map the unexplored country between
Cochin and Madurai and so they followed the Periyar into the mountains and then headed north into
what at that time was described as "the dark impenetrable forests of the High Range". They lost men
to at least one elephant charge, suffered agony from leech bites and once ran so short of food that a
deer run down and being feasted on by wild dogs was manna for the party and their jungle guides.
The subsequent report by Ward and Connor was to lead to the Periyar Dam project, completed only
in the 1890s,but for the present they were more pre occupied getting into the mountains that they
could see towering in the distance from Bodi. Then, on 14 October 1817, "the weather having
improved the ascent into the High Range began".
Their first major camp was at a flat promontory at 6000 feet. And this was ever afterwards to be
known as Top Station. Moving north, they saw to their south the Cardamom Hills, a slope 45 miles
long and 30 wide from the heights above Bodi stretching into Travancore. To their north there
appeared to be grasslands on high rock peaks. And in front of them, "an outstanding mountain,
shaped like an elephant’s head". On 8 November, they established camp at the confluence of three
rivers, which they judged to be the centre of the district, and from Munnar ("Moonar – three rivers),
as it came to be known, they surveyed the area, discovered the ancient village of Neramangalam in
ruins but surmised that it might well have been from here that ivory and peacock feathers, pepper
and cardamom, sandalwood and other timber went to the lands to the West across the Arabian
Sea".