Meghalaya, the Scotland of the East, has pristine beauty in the form of undulating hills, green dales, rivers and valleys, rolling meadows, gurgling waterfalls — the list is endless. The charm of this place beholds any onlooker who can easily fall in love with the mesmerising beauty of this place on his or her first visit. In fact, there is no visitor who has not longed to return to the lap of nature after the first tryst with Meghalaya’s beauty. The thirst remains to be quenched only by several visits.
The beauty of this charming hill station is often found not in the frequented sites but mostly in the hidden yet breathtaking locales which have not quite found its mark in the tourism circuit.
One such place is Mawkyrduk, which means a collection of stones, which is only two-and-a-half-hour drive from Shillong. It is nestled in the tiny village called Mawlangwir in Mawkrywat, the headquarters of South West Khasi Hills.
A recent visit to this place was not only breathtaking but also left me gasping with joy as to our sheer amazement and wonder we came across thousands of black hard rocks dotting the landscape. This array of extremely mammoth hard rocks is almost spell-binding. One wonders how this place suddenly has such a large number of ‘black beauties’ stretched kilometers after kilometers which gives one a sense of mystery of the unknown and the undefined, an uncharted enigma.
To feel the true sense of this magical romance in rocks, one needs to visit the place to behold and be beheld by the aura and the sheer sense of magnificence. All I can do for the readers of Sunday Shillong is to give a glimpse of Mawkyrduk through photographs. One can only be fascinated by the rocky terrain and fall in love with this uneven distribution of stones which have become steadfast, strong and serene over time.
(Contributed by Moushumi Dey)