Wilpita, and the Fish Named After It

Our second farm is at Wilpita, also in the Matara District, inland from the town of Akuressa.

It is lower and drier than Morawaka, and the ground is gentler.

A small forest

There is a forest reserve at Wilpita. It is small. About 15 hectares of closed canopy and about 29 hectares planted, on ground that rises from around 20 metres to about 100 (AmazingLanka).

You could walk across it in a morning.

The fish

A small freshwater fish here carries the name of the place. It is the Wilpita rasbora, Rasbora wilpita, described by Kottelat and Pethiyagoda in 1991 from this area, which is where the name comes from (Wikipedia).

It lives only in south-western Sri Lanka, in shallow, slow, heavily shaded streams, and the IUCN lists it as vulnerable.

We want to be careful with that. We have seen it written that the fish lives in one stream and nowhere else, and we cannot find an assessment that says so, so we are not going to repeat it. What the record supports is a small fish that lives in this corner of the country and is already under pressure.

Water

There is a lot of water here. The Lenabatuwa Wewa is a natural lake of over 180 acres with about 16 kilometres of shoreline, and there is a natural spring at Wilpita Bubula that people have used for a long time (AmazingLanka).

Water in the ground is the whole job for a cinnamon farm, and there is plenty of it here.

Why two farms

People ask why we do not buy everything from one place.

The two are different. Morawaka is higher and wetter and borders the rainforest. Wilpita is lower and calmer. They do not cut at the same time, so between them the year has fewer gaps.

It also means we know which of the two any batch came off.

Being honest about it

We are not going to tell you the fish does anything for the flavour. It does not.

What we will say is that a vulnerable species living in the shaded streams of the district we farm in is not somebody else’s problem. These are small places, and a farm next door has some responsibility not to make things worse. Cinnamon suits that. It is a tree, it is cut back rather than pulled out, and the roots stay in the hill between cuttings.

The first piece, on Morawaka, is here.

Sources: Wilpita rasbora, Wikipedia · Wilpita wewa, AmazingLanka · Wilpita Bubula, AmazingLanka

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Satellite imagery © Esri.