Karst so broken that it stopped an empire. Conical hills and steep-sided hollows up to 120 metres deep, repeating for miles across west-central Jamaica, mostly in Trelawny. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries formerly enslaved people, the Maroons, took to this ground and held it, with two major Leeward Maroon settlements in here during the wars with the colonial forces, because an army that does not know the sinkholes cannot move through it. It is still nearly untraversable: the Barbecue Bottom Road along a fault valley in the east is the only drivable route across the whole thing. The forest reserve, declared in 1950, covers 221.75 square kilometres and is Jamaica’s largest unbroken rainforest, holding 90 percent of the world’s black-billed amazons and a frog found nowhere else.
Trelawny, Jamaica
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