Velliyankallu: where river, legend, and madness meet 🌿🌊

Velliyankallu: where river, legend, and madness meet 🌿🌊

After Pattambi, I stopped at Velliyankallu, a silent granite outcrop watching over Bharathapuzha. Here, Nila slows down, spreads itself wide, and seems to remember older times—when stories flowed as freely as water.

This land is deeply soaked in the legend of Parayi Petta Panthirukulam—the twelve children born to one mother, scattered across these very plains, raised in different homes, becoming ancestors of many communities. Along Bharathapuzha, this story feels alive: one river, many banks; one origin, many identities.

It is also the land of Naranathu Bhranthan—the barefoot wanderer who laughed at the world’s logic, pushing stones uphill only to let them roll down again. Standing at Velliyankallu, the rock itself feels like one of his companions, silently asking: Who is truly mad—the one who sees through illusion, or the ones trapped inside it?

Velliyankallu has long been a marker and meeting point—for travellers, farmers, storytellers. Today it is a heritage space, calm and inviting. Yet beneath the stillness lies a deeper truth: this is a landscape where geography shaped folklore, where the openness of the Palakkad Gap allowed not just winds and rivers to pass, but ideas of unity, questioning, and quiet rebellion against rigid order.

Here, stone holds memory.

The river carries legend.

And somewhere between them, the laughter of Naranathu Bhranthan still echoes—reminding us that beneath caste, reason, and routine, we all roll back to the same origin.