Udawattakele Sri Rama Viharaya

Sri Rama Viharaya sits on a small hillock above Trinity College, reached by a footpath through Udawattakele forest or by a gravel road that runs past Sri Dalada Thapovanaya and the Kandy Municipal Council. What remains today is modest: an image house, a Bodhi tree, and monks' living quarters set into the trees.

According to local historical accounts, the temple's origin is traced to the reign of King Panditha Parakramabahu of the Kurunegala kingdom, whose reign is dated by different sources to various points in the early fourteenth century. His nephew and minister, Prince Siriwardhana Seneviratne, is said to have identified this hillock as suitable for a forest monastery and established it on the king's orders — the same founding episode credited with producing Asgiri Maha Viharaya. Five monks were reportedly brought from the Asgiri hermitage at Walasgala, near Yapahuwa, to begin monastic life here, linking the site to the early Asgiri forest-monk tradition. The story is recorded in the Asgiri Upatha, a set of forty-three ola-leaf manuscripts on Asgiri Viharaya's history, completed early in the reign of King Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe.

During the reign of Kirti Sri Rajasinghe, a monk remembered as Maharama Maha Thera is said to have lived here as a meditation hermit — traditionally the source of the name Rama Viharaya. Another monk, Palabathgala Wanaratana, is remembered for teaching Vidarshana meditation at the site. Under British administration much of the temple's land was granted away, some of it to the Church Missionary Society and folded into the grounds of Trinity College, founded in 1872; adjoining land went to St Paul's Church from the neighbouring Kandy Pattini Devalaya. What was once a forest monastery is now a largely overlooked outpost of the Asgiri chapter.