Cockpit Country

The ground the Maroons held because nobody else could cross it

Cockpit Country is the karst interior of west-central Jamaica, mostly in Trelawny and running into Saint Elizabeth, Saint James, Saint Ann, Manchester and the northern tip of Clarendon. Conical hills and ridges stand between steep-sided hollows as deep as 120 metres, and around the hamlet of Quick Step the shallow caves known locally as cockpits reach a density of 15 per square kilometre.

That ground sheltered people escaping slavery on the sugar plantations of the lowlands. In the First Maroon War the two Leeward Maroon communities were Cudjoe's Town, also called Trelawny Town, and Accompong Town. After their peace treaty in 1740 the Leeward Maroons helped the colonial authorities hunt runaways in the hills, but the runaways sided with Trelawny Town in the Second Maroon War. When the Trelawny Maroons were deported in 1796, new free communities took hold: Cuffee's at the start of the 19th century, then Me-no-Sen-You-no-Come, and both held off the militias and Accompong Town. During the Baptist War of 1831 and 1832 more people escaped here. In the southwest lies the Land of Look Behind, named for Spanish horsemen said to have ridden two to a mount, one facing the rear to watch for ambush.

The only drivable route across is the Barbecue Bottom Road, high on the side of a fault valley in the east. Further west, the old Troy Trail and Quick Step Trail were seldom used and hard to find by 2006. The forest reserve, designated in 1950, covers 221.75 square kilometres of Jamaica's largest remaining unbroken rainforest. It holds 90 per cent of the world's black-billed amazons, a frog found nowhere else, Eleutherodactylus sisyphodemus, and the Jamaican swallowtail, the largest butterfly in the Western Hemisphere.

On November 21, 2017, Prime Minister Andrew Holness told the House of Representatives that about 74,726 hectares would become the Cockpit Country Protected Area, closed to mining. The government gave up millions of tonnes of high-grade bauxite and limestone to protect the water and the forest, extended the surrounding forest reserves, and asked for the area to be nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site.