This episode is dedicated to a 200 year old mountain war.

Hills are of course what Kandy is celebrated for - and its most famous city-centre mountain, Bahirawa Kanda, or Gnome Mountain, is home to one of the tallest statues of Lord Buddha. It was once, more memorably, home to some atypical human sacrifice, involving a particularly beautiful girl, Dingiri Menika who lived right next to the Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, in Galagedera.

Selected to stimulate the moribund fertility of a Kandyan queen, the girl was kidnapped by soldiers, loaded with jasmine, and propelled with elephants, drummers, and banner-bearers to a stake for overnight consumption by demons. Quite why anyone thought a feast such as this might make the despondent queen procreate is a mystery. Fortunately, the king’s elephant keeper got to Dingiri Menika first; rescued her, married her, in fact - and set up home with her in Welligalle Maya, in Cross Street, close to Kandy Super Phone, Ltd, a present-day mobile phone supplier. But although the king, Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe, chose to terminate all future human sacrifice, his late-burgeoning liberal values were not destined to bring him any greater luck. Within a few years he had been exiled to India, along with at least two of his four wives, the third of which was to use her exile for bankrupting shopping sprees.

Protected by a necklace of high mountains - Alagalla Mountains, Bible Rock, Uthuwankanda, Devanagala, Ambuluwawa, the Knuckles and Hanthana - and surrounded by dense jungle ideal for guerrilla warfare, the Kandyan kingdom’s natural defences helped it withstand repeated invasions. Secretive defensive, forever on the alert, the kingdom guarded its independence with valiant and unrelenting focus. Such behaviour was not quite on a par with the fabled Sakoku isolationist policies that made the Japanese Tokugawa shogunate so famous until they were breached by American gunboats in 1853 – but it certainly had much in common with it.

The Alagalla Mountains is an especial trekkers’ paradise, offering its visitors a range of hard core or easy treks. Its range of dry evergreen, montane, and sub-montane forests are home to many species of fauna and flora, including wild boar, monkeys here, squirrel, anteaters, porcupine, monitor lizard, tortoise – but it is especially noted for its 50 recoded bird species which include Sri Lankan junglefowls, Layard’s parakeets, and yellow-fronted barbets.

A little over 15 miles from Alagalla is Bible Rock itself, a stunning example of a Table Mountain. Over 5,500 feet high, its curious open book shape inspired early Victorian missionaries to give it its canonical name, though 300 years earlier it performed a vital task as a look out post for the Kandyan kings, eager to spot the latest colonial invasions, especially those of the Portuguese. A classic series of bonfires, running mountain to mountain, starting here, and ending close to Kandy was the trusted warning signal that was used, just like the famous Armada Fire Beacons in England in 1588. Steep though the climb is, it doesn’t take long to get to the top – and one of the best views in the country.

Some four miles away from Alagalla is the little town of Balana. The Balana pass, on the southern edge of the Alagalla Mountains was the second of two critical entry points into the kingdom, the other being at Galagedera. “Balana” is the Sinhala word for” look-out,” and look out it did, commanding from its perch 2000 feet about sea level, a perfect view of the entire territory that any enemy would have to cross.

Balana foiled a Portuguese invasion in 1593. Several later attempts by the Portuguese resulted in their armies being destroyed – most especially at nearby Danthure. The political, military, and religious machinations that led to this point were as intricate and complicated as anything since the ascent of man. They involved the scandalous conversion of Buddhist kings to Catholicism, the betrayal of a kingdom, the reassertion of Buddhist militarism, the forcible marriage of the last dynastic princess to a succession of Kandyan kings, and the last great throw of the dice by the Portuguese to seize control of the entire island. Shameless cheek, betrayal, gorilla skirmishes from impenetrable jungle depths, abysmal weather and escalating terror marked the Danthure campaign. It was to end on the 8th of October 1594, the Portuguese army of twenty thousand men reduced to just ninety-three at the battle of Danthure. The survivors were left wishing they had not outlived their compatriots as their noses, ears and gentiles were severed. A memorial of sorts, even if only in the heads of passing guests, can be felt at the Danthure Rajamaha built centuries before the events that were to immortalise it occurred.

Just a few years later, in 1603 another attempt was made. The Portuguese observer Queyroz wrote “the new fortalice of Balana stood on a lofty hill upon a rock on its topmost peak; and it was more strong by position than by art, with four bastions and one single gate; and for its defence within and without there was an arrayal of 8,000 men with two lines of stockade which protected them with its raised ground, and a gate at the foot of the rock and below one of the bastions which commanded the ascent by a narrow, rugged, steep, and long path cut in the Hill.”

Three days of bitter fighting eventually led to its capitulation, the Portuguese conducting a special Thanksgiving service in the fort, but it was a very short victory. Within days the Portuguese had fled, their long retreat back to Colombo beset by guerrilla fighting. But by 1616, aided by the accent of Senerat, one of the few notably inept Kandyan monarchs, Balana was reoccupied by the Portuguese - and improved with a drawbridge over a moat, the addition of a large water tank for sieges and the clearing of trees to a distance of a musket shot. Ruins of the fort remain even to this day, most especially the foundations opf the higher buildings in their quadrangular layout of 3 circular bastions. Parts of the lower fort are lost in the jungle - its many ramparts, ditches, and buildings.

And it was here, around Balana, at the Battle of Gannoruwa, that the imperial ambitions of the Portuguese finally met their grim finale. The mercenary army of Diogo de Melo de Castro, the Portuguese Captain General, had marched up from Colombo a third time to try, in 1638, to capture the Kandyan kingdom of Rajasinghe II. The king, sitting with deceptive and majestic leisureliness under the shade of a great tree, conducted the battle with razor sharp stratagems. Weakened by mass desertions, just 33 Portuguese soldiers survived of the 4,000 that made up the army, almost all of them reduced to heads piled up before the victorious king.

The king, with his alliance with the Dutch, had managed to drive the Portuguese from the island once and for all. This proved to be a mixed blessing as his dubious association merely saddled him with a new colonial occupier. The Dutch were to prove much more professional and ruthless than the Portuguese as they went about their colonial mission.

Bnut Portugal’s failure marked the blossoming of the last kingdom - the kingdom of Kandy. The kingdom was to endure for over two hundred years; and to meet head on the invasive forces of two more colonial armies – the Dutch and the British. And although it ultimately succumbed, betrayed more from within than without, it put up such a fight as to ensure the continued survival of the island’s culture until it could be better cherished after independence in ...