A WIZARD OF WOOD

Just a few kilometres from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel is the woodcarving workshop run by Mahinda Jayalath, who has been carving for 30 years. His workshop is arrestingly modest – a mere covered shelter off a tiny back road where he and his three workers sit making their carvings. His work sits within a most ancient and celebrated Kandyan tradition, for it was here, in the Kandyan kingdom, that the island produced one of its most significant and most forgotten artists - Delmada Devendra Mulachari, the Grinling Gibbons of Sri Lanka.

Mulachari is renowned for its proximity to Embekke Devale, a magical medieval masterpiece in which formality occupies but the smallest part. In every section, in every place, are the surviving 500 statues of the great artist, each a masterpiece in itself. Exquisitely carved models of entwined swans and ropes, mothers breastfeeding children, double-headed eagles, soldiers, horses, wrestlers and elephants – all validate why this temple is famed across Asia for its world-class carvings. But there is more. Fantasy intervenes. Erupting from a vein is a figure of a woman; a bird assumes human attributes; a sleight of hand reveals that an elephant is a bull; another, that a lion. Today, the demand for wood carvings is for doors and windows, lattice work above doors, and statues of Lord Buddha, plus the odd elephant or cobra for the tourist market. All this, and more, is what Mahinda Jayalath and his tiny team put out. Should you be around for more than 2 or 3 days, he is more than likely to have enough time to make any special commission.