Ashok Dham, Lakhisarai

On 7 April 1977, a boy called Ashok and his friends were playing on a brick mound at Lakhisarai when they uncovered the top of a stone. The dug-out linga was over a metre high and of Pala workmanship; the site, which excavation tied to a 9th–11th-century temple, became Ashok Dham, and the temple built over it by the Lakhisarai trust is now one of Bihar's busiest Shiva shrines. Shravan Mondays and Shivaratri bring lakhs; the kanwariyas who carry Ganga water from Sultanganj to Deoghar increasingly stop here too.

Lakhisarai itself is archaeologically dense — the medieval 'Krimila' of Pala inscriptions — with Jaynagar's Lali Pahari hill, where a brick monastery was excavated in 2017, the Bichwe and Balgudar mounds, and sculptures surfacing in every village. Little of it is presented yet, which makes it a place for the curious rather than the comfortable.