Hill Retreat

Expansive vistas of the Himalaya, shaded wooded glens and quaint colonial bungalows have made it a writers’ getaway for ages. Away from the bustle of adjacent Mussoorie, explore the charm that is Landour.

- Anurag Mallick

As I set off from Rokeby Manor along the old bridle trail called the ‘Chukkar,’ encircling the three summits of Landour ridge, the pre-dawn mountain air was crisp and invigorating. The pretty, forested hillside was dotted with gabled bungalows with names like Kenilworth, Ivanhoe, Waverly and Woodstock, echoing themes from Sir Walter Scott’s novels. Some of the colonial-era cottages mirrored their Scottish and Irish heritage – Scottsburn, Wolfsburn, Redburn, Shamrock Cottage, Tipperary, Killarney. It wasn’t hard to understand why the British-era cantonment of Landour, around seven kilometres uphill from Mussoorie, was named after Llanddowror, a village thousands of miles away in southwest Wales!

The story goes back to the early 19th century, when the British halted the Gurkha conquest of Kumaon-Garhwal and moved from the plains of Dehradun to create a military sanatorium in the hills. In 1825, Captain Frederick Young, the ‘discoverer’ of Mussoorie and commandant of the first Gurkha battalion raised after the Gurkha War, built the first permanent home in Landour. His house, Mullingar, was named after his county town in Ireland. By the early 20th century, Mullingar became a hotel and during the Second World War was leased to the army to accommodate the spillover of wounded soldiers from the sanatorium.

I followed the path to Lal Tibba or Depot Hill, referring to the ‘depot’ that stretched around Landour’s highest point, Childer’s Lodge. It was the best spot in town to catch a glimpse of a 200-km stretch of the Himalaya. And I was just in time for the spectacle. As dawn broke, the first rays of the sun fell on Himalayan peaks like Swargarohini, Bandarpunch, Chaukhamba and Nanda Devi, turning them pink, red and then a dazzling golden-yellow. The telescope on top of the double-storey viewing platform offered a closer look at the massifs.