Lipton's Seat, the Dambatenne Tea Factory and Adisham Bungalow from Ella

Thomas Lipton bought his first Ceylon estates in 1890, and Dambatenne was one of them. He built the factory that still stands there and, the story goes, used to ride up to a rock outcrop above it to look out over everything he owned. That outcrop is Lipton's Seat, at about 1,970 metres, and on a clear morning the view runs across five provinces to the southern plain.

The emphasis is on clear and on morning. By nine or ten the valley below fills with cloud and there is nothing to see, which is the same problem as World's End and has the same answer: go early. Some visitors walk the seven kilometres up from Dambatenne through the tea, which takes about two hours and is one of the better walks in the hill country; most drive.

The Dambatenne factory is a working plant and one of the oldest in Sri Lanka, and a visit takes the leaf from the withering troughs through rolling, oxidation and firing to the grading table.

Adisham Bungalow, back towards Haputale, is a 1930s English country house built by a British planter and now a Benedictine monastery. It is genuinely odd — Tudor-style stone in the middle of Sri Lankan tea country — and the monks sell jam.

Ella is a village at 1,040 metres in the southern hill country, reached by the train from Kandy that most people rate the finest railway journey in Asia, and its sights are all within a few kilometres: the Nine Arch Bridge, a brick viaduct of 1921 in a gorge of tea, which a train crosses several times a day; Little Adam's Peak, a 40-minute walk through tea to a ridge; Ella Rock, a harder three-hour climb; and Ravana Falls on the road down to Wellawaya. Mornings are clear and afternoons in the wet months bring cloud into the gap, so the walks are done early. Tuk-tuks are the transport, and every guesthouse can find one.