An arc of land that fans out north of Kandy connected to the ancient Anuradhapuran kings and their successors, before passing into the control of the Kandyan kingdom, whose own borders ebbed and flowed in response to European invasions.

This neglected northern section of the Kandyan kingdom centred on three provinces: Anuradhapura in the far north, Matale in the northeast, and the Seven Korales in the northwest.

From the arrival of the Portuguese to the final annexation of the kingdom by the British in 1815, control over these three distant provinces fluctuated. But regardless of who was in actual power, nothing could blur the fact that in almost all respects of topography, climate, history, geography, resources and economy, these areas were utterly different to the high hilly and mountainous character of the rest of the kingdom.

Although ruled in the main by the Kandyan kings, their own ancestry was much older, dating back to the first Singhalese king in 543 BCE. To walk through their fields and forests and witness their surviving ancient buildings is to see how the last Singla stronghold grafted itself onto the most ancient part of Sri Lanka like a limpet.

And probably one of the best ways to experience it is to take a circular tour of 5 of the most significant temples that dominate this elusive land, to places long lost to modern travellers.

The circuit starts at the Vilbawa Rajamaha temple, which legend connects to Kuveni, the wife of the island’s first king, Vijaya. But Kuveni was not simply a wife, nor even a weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, or queen. She was also a demon, a metamorphoser, an outcast, an avenging fury, a suicide, a traitor, a murderess, a ghost, and a mistress of deception. A descendant of the gods, she is also a goddess to the country’s still-living Aboriginal peoples.

Kuveni and her husband Vijaya were the pin-up lovers of their generation, the Bonnie and Clyde of 543 BCE. Only theirs was a more unorthodox passion - more akin to Dido and Aeneas, with the queen immolating herself. But whilst it is hard to find a corner of Sri Lanka that is not branded “Vijaya,” in besotted memory of the country’s founding paterfamilias, it is much harder to find similarly smitten organisations that bear the name “Kuveni.” Coming from a nation that boasts the modern world’s first female head of state, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, in 1960, this seems a monumental omission. But delve a little further, and it becomes increasingly clear why Kuveni is the queen that the country is too alarmed by to acknowledge adequately.

Kuveni was to confound and challenge all ancient ideas of womanhood, and go on challenging them to this day. Her story starts as she sits trapped in her modest palace, a pawn in her father’s political armoury. She is, naturally, no ordinary princess. Descending from King Ravana, the ten-headed evil demon king who fatally kidnapped the wife of the Supreme Being, her bloodline offers a clue, if ever one were needed, to a family proclivity for violence, chaos, and injustice. But in Vijaya, she spots a way to escape the prison of her family.

Vijay, a shaved-head fugitive with a penchant for what The Mahavamsa calls “evil conduct and … intolerable deeds,” was exiled by his father and arrived in Sri Lanka, a man in need of friends. Friends, land, food: in fact, at the time he came on Sri Lanka’s shore, he was a man in need of pretty much everything. And in Kuvani, he found just about everything.

Overcoming some immediate disagreements in which she almost eats him and imprisons his entire band of feckless followers, she performed a faultless volte-face, gave them food and clothing, and, according to the ancient Mahavamsa Chronicle, beaming with broad indulgence, if Chronicles can be said to beam, “assumed the lovely form of a sixteen-year-old maiden.”

Although marriage was what Vijaya and Kuveni agreed on, they also executed a plan to annihilate her Yakka tribe. But much good did any of this do her? In using Vijaya, she was, in turn, to be even more devastatingly used by him. Soon after inaugurating his new kingdom at Tambapanni and fathering two children, Vijaya abandoned her, sending for a more respectable princess, one who was drawing-room perfect, and banishing his native wife to the wilderness.

Rejected by both her husband and the people she came from and had betrayed and killed, Kuveni climbed or was forced to the top of a mountain and hurled down, cursing her disloyal husband as she died. Her husband was to die without heirs. A (presumably related) disease struck down his successor, and his entire children were demented by bloodshed, civil war, and familicide.

Across the entire island, a lonesome scrap of haunting folklore offers a hint at the final resting place of Queen Kuveni. There is nothing to verify it except the curious behaviour of the local people. Visitors to the village are welcomed to its little temple, the Maligatenna Raja Maha Viharaya, but not permitted to walk to the top of the little hill above it, where the queen’s crypt is said to lie.

About 15 miles from here is the Ridi Viharaya. Although substantially restored in the 18th century by the Kandyan king, Kirti Sri Rajasinghe, the temple dates back to the 2nd century BCE – roughly the same time as the Rosetta Stone was chiselled into a basalt slab in distant pharaonic Egypt.

To better understand the supreme importance of this ancient temple, take a look at pictures of the oldest of the island’s three most incredible stupas, the Ruwanweliseya, built between 161 and 137 BCE by King Dutugamunu.

The first steps in its construction are told in extraordinary detail by the Mahavamsa Chronicle. “King Dutugamunu had the workers dig a 7-cubit deep excavation. He had soldiers bring in round stones and had them crushed with hammers. Crushed stones were placed at the bottom of the excavation and compacted using elephants. The Elephants had their feet bound in leather to protect them. Fine clay was brought in from a nearby river. This clay was known as butter clay since it was very fine. King Dutugamunu ordered that butter clay be spread over crushed stones. After the butter clay layer was placed, the King ordered that bricks be brought. Bricks were placed on top of the butter clay layer. On top of the bricks, an iron mesh was placed. Mountain crystals were placed atop iron bars. Another layer of stones was placed on top of the mountain crystals. On top of the stones, an 8-inch-thick copper plate was placed. A copper plate was sprayed with Arsenic and Sesame oil. On top of the copper plate, a seven-inch-thick silver plate was placed.”

And that was just the beginning. The king was to die before the stupa was completed, and the Mahavamsa tells of the dying monarch being carried in a palanquin to see the works. Standing for centuries and now much restored, its fabled relic chamber has yet to resist all attempts at excavation. Within it is said to be a vessel filled with Lord Buddha’s artefacts, placed atop a seat of diamonds, encased in a golden container adorned with gems, and set inside a room decorated with murals and a silver replica of the Bo Tree.

The Mahavamsa Chronicle notes its sovereign importance: “The relic-chamber shall not shake even by an earthquake; flowers that were offered on that day shall not wither till the end of Buddha Gotama's Dispensation; the lamps that were kindled shall not be extinguished; the clay that was mixed with perfume ...