A few kilometres outside the tea town of Ella, in Sri Lanka's Uva highlands, the railway steps over a forested gorge on nine stone arches, built in 1921 without a single piece of steel. The official record credits a British engineer, Harold Cuthbert Marwood. A local legend that refuses to die gives it instead to a Sinhalese drummer, P. K. Appuhami. He is said to have stabilised the marshy ground with rock fill when the imported engineering stalled, then to have lain down beneath the arches as the first train crossed, staking his life on his own work. No document supports any of that, and it is told anyway. In Sinhala it is Ahas Namaye Palama, the bridge of nine skies: from the right spot on the valley floor each opening frames a separate piece of sky, and the nine stack into a receding row.
That spot is the tea path under the arches, where people wait for the blue highland train to inch across, far above them. The second way is to walk it. The track curves through forest and tea gardens to the deck, and between trains you step from sleeper to sleeper out onto the span, the forest floor a long way below. The third is to ride it. The Kandy–Badulla line is one of the great slow rail journeys, curling past waterfalls, tunnels and endless tea. Just down from Ella at Demodara it beats a steep slope by spiralling through a full loop and diving into a tunnel bored directly beneath its own track. Crossing from inside the carriage, you look straight down into the gorge you would otherwise be photographing from below; leaning out of the doorway on this line has cost lives. Above the town an easy path climbs through tea fields to Little Adam's Peak at 1,141 metres, where the Ella Gap falls away and the highlands stack up around you. None of it is a monument. The line is in daily use, the trains run quietly and arrive without much warning, and you spend the whole visit listening for them.