Entering the village from the road one comes across a board of Kurkihar near a temple built at least 200 years ago. There is a large elevated mound on which the temple is built with materials recovered from the ruins. I could see that ancient materials used in the construction of the temple could still be traced between the painted and plastered walls. The pujari of the temple who was living at the temple since many years had no idea of the antiquity of the place, nor any idea about the site having been a storehouse of Buddhist sculpture.

Though the site is a protected monument owing to the mound which is likely to yield many more artefacts if properly excavated, there is not much for the tourist to see here except for the sculptures in the walls of the temple and a miniature stone stupa containing images of the Buddha in the grabha griha of the temple which houses the idols of Lord Shri Rama, Lakshmana and Sita. The main mound measures about 600 feet square and about 25 feet in height, which as seen from Cunningham’s sketch plan, includes ruins of a small fort with solid brick walls. It is obviously this mound which Kittoe refers to in his account of the place. He saw here the numerous Buddhist images, large and small, but also innumerable votive stupas rather characteristic of the place. He says there were, in his time, “rows after rows of chaityas extending north and south for several hundred feet”,while in 1872 Broadley was also struck by the varieties of the chaityas of which he had about twenty five distinct varieties in his own collection then.

To be continued...