For a host of reasons, not the least of which being its distance from the sea, Palakkad has rarely been featured in older travel accounts. One traveller, who managed to briefly visit the district, was a highly influential English clergyman by the name of George Trevor Spencer. Spencer, who was appointed the Bishop of Madras in 1837, took notes of his journey to Kerala and published them in London in a book titled Journal of a Visitation to the Provinces of Travancore and Tinnevelly, in the Diocese of Madras, 1840-41.
It is clear from his writings that Spencer fell in love with Palakkad or Paulghaut as he spelt it. “After passing through a vast jungle, or rather forest, for it fairly deserves that more ennobling title, and contains some splendid timber, we emerged upon a country almost as Italian as Italy itself,” Spencer wrote. “At one village I could have fancied myself in the neighbourhood of the Lago Maggiore; not that there is a lake, for like almost all Indian scenery, it wants water; but still it is very different from anything I have yet met with here; I think more beautiful, and certainly more humanized.
” The comparisons with Italy continued. “The huts of this village have a particularly neat appearance, thatched with palm-leaves, which might easily be mistaken for those of the Gran Turco, and wreathed with the gourd, rich at once in flowers and fruit, the almost universal ornament of the Italian cottage; and they are all enclosed by a pretty bamboo fence, e.