Kal Munai Old Survey Tower (Photo credit: Tharindu Ranasinghe, Google street view)
Kal Munai Old Survey Tower (Sinhala: කල්මුනායි පැරණි මිනුම් කුළුණ) is a colonial-period survey tower located in Kilinochchi District, Sri Lanka.
History
The Department of Survey of Sri Lanka (or the Department of the Surveyor General) which is the oldest unchanged government department in the country, was established by the British on 2 August 1800 (Vithana, 2006). Under the Surveyor General W. D. Gosset (1855-1858), the establishment of control for surveys on the island commenced with the base measurements in 1857 for Principal Triangulation and several survey towers were used across the country for this process (Dias et al., 2016).
The tower at Kal Munai is said to be one of the survey towers built by the British.
The tower at Kal Munai is said to be one of the survey towers built by the British.
The tower
The tower which is square in shape has been built with cubic shape cut
limestone rocks. At the bottom of the tower, an arch-shaped passage can be seen. The tower is getting smaller as it
rises from the bottom to the top.
A protected monument
The old survey post belonging to Kalmunei village situated in Grama Niladhari Division No. KN 68, Kavutharimunei in the Divisional Secretary’s Division, Poonaryn is an archaeological protected monument, declared by a government Gazette notification published on 24 March 2016.
References
1) Dias, M.; Koralage, S.B.; Asanga, K., 2016. The archaeological heritage of Jaffna peninsula. Department of Archaeology. Colombo. p.226.2) Vithana, P. K., 2006. Surveying and mapping in Sri Lanka. Seventeenth United Nations Regional Cartographic Conference for Asia and the Pacific Bangkok. pp.1-9.
3) The Gazette of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. No: 1960. 24 March 2016. p.229.
Location Map
This page was last updated on 25 June 2023