Art. II.—Notes on the Megalithic Monuments of the Coimbatore District, Madras

Extract

The Coimbatore District, containing more than 8000 square miles, is almost centrally situated in the south of the Peninsula, within the region occupied by the Tamil-speaking race, being about 250 miles west of Madras, and 80 east of the Malabar coast. Mysore bounds it on the north, and the Madras and Tinnevelly districts lie between it and Cape Comorin. Megalithic monuments are found in all the Madras districts, but I am inclined to think are most numerous in Coimbatore, where singly, in twos or threes, or in assemblages of scores or hundreds, they occur in every variety of situation, high on the ghauts and wild mountainsides, in remote jungles and malarious river-valleys, on wide open plains, on cultivated land, amid fertile gardens and rice tracts. Excluding the Nilgiri Hills, which, though belonging to Coimbatore, are a separate region, with a group of remains peculiar to themselves, the Coimbatore monuments are all sepulchral, consisting of kistvaens or tumuli, containing cists or chambers, originally underground, but now often more or less exposed. Stone-circles and standing stones are almost always associated with the tumuli, but never, so far as I know, found independently, as in other parts of India and in Europe. Neither am I aware of any true cromlech in Coimbatore. It may be interesting to give some account of two of the principal assemblages of these remains, one on the east, and another on the west side of the district. Seven miles north of Perămdoŏry, the chief town of a talook of the same name, midway between the towns of Salem and Coimbatore, after passing along a tract of fertile bottom-land, luxuriant with topes and gardens, the ground, iust beyond the village of Năllămpătti, rises into one of the wide rolling barren maidans characteristic of Southern India, on which a great cairn-cemetery is situated. Many hundreds of cairns are spread over a considerable tract; in general appearance heaps of blackened stones, some very small, and thence of every size up to 30 feet and more in diameter, they vary in height from one to four feet, but have evidently been much worn down by lapse of time and weather.