Salem
— — a city held inside a ring of low blue mountains.
Not only on a wall.
“An old steel and mango town in the Tamil interior, ringed by five hills the geographers gave separate names but the eye reads as one quiet horizon. The Shevaroys rise in the east toward Yercaud and its coffee slopes. The Tirumanimuttar river crosses the city on its way to the Kaveri. In the mornings the auto-rickshaws pour out of Hasthampatti, the bus stand fills, and the mango trade in Vazhapadi opens for the season. The city is not a postcard town. It is a working one, watched over by hills.
Salem, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Salem is a city of just over eight hundred thousand people in the western interior of Tamil Nadu, about three hundred and fifty kilometres south-west of Chennai. It sits at roughly 278 metres above sea level in a basin ringed by five hills — Nagaramalai, Jeragamalai, Kanjamalai, Godumalai, and the Shevaroys — and is drained by the Tirumanimuttar, a tributary of the Kaveri. The city is the administrative seat of Salem district and a major node on the Chennai-Bengaluru rail corridor, served by Salem Junction.
The Kanjamalai range west of the city is one of the older iron-ore belts on the Indian peninsula, and Salem has been a steel town since the Salem Steel Plant of SAIL opened here in 1982 to supply the country's stainless cold-rolled sheet. The bedrock here is mostly magnetite quartzite and charnockite, the same Precambrian basement that surfaces across the southern Deccan. The hills around the city carry the same low, weathered profile that the geologist Bruce Foote first mapped through this region in the late nineteenth century.
Salem mangoes are a protected geographical indication, and the orchards around Vazhapadi and Mettur to the north of the city ship the local Salem Gundu and Banganapalli varieties through May and June each year. The north-east monsoon brings most of the city's rainfall between October and December, and the dry months between January and April are when the Shevaroys, an hour up the ghat road at Yercaud, fill with weekenders from Chennai and Bengaluru looking for cooler air at fifteen hundred metres.