The Chalukyan Architecture of the Kanarese Districts c10.5

c10.5

The town, with its lake behind it, is held in the embrace of the rugged sandstone hills, whose beetling cliffs circle around them and throw out fortified horns to the north and the south. The crags and boulders, covered with wild cactus and jungle—its evergreen tints contrasting with, and enhancing the ruddy hues of the rocks—leave but a few rough boulder-strewn passages up through gorges and rents between the detached masses to the ruined forts above. That on the north is known as the Bīvan-baṇḍe-kōṭi or ‘Fort of the Fifty-two Large Rocks,’ while that on the southern horn is the Raṇamaṇḍala-kōṭi, or ‘Fort of the Field of Battle.’ The old town walls, with their ditches, join up the northern with the southern forts, bowing out westward, and so enclosing the village between them and the tank. A souvenir of its later warlike days is an old iron cannon which still lies upon the top of the western bastion of the southern fort. It is an old English piece dated 8-2-25 and is 6′ 10½″ long. Plate XXVIII gives a view of the village and southern fort.