The fields were a beautiful green, some pale with waving maize almost ready to be harvested, others covered with fresh grass or young potatoes. In many a plot of green we passed a peasant woman in charge of two or three cows, all attached to a rope which she held in her hand. As we passed the villages we noted behind every house a quaint Gallegan maize barn (_Gal. horreo_), raised on four or six stone pedestals, and built like a diminutive stone house with a gabled roof. The trellis porch of almost every cottage was covered with a vine, and vine-covered verandahs hid most of the lower walls; the vine leaves had not begun to appear, but their knotted and spreading branches were very picturesque. Spring flowers were peeping from the banks beneath the hedges, and we descended several times from our carriage to gather flowers we had never seen in England, and of which we did not know the names. Ever and anon we passed groves of chestnut and walnut trees, and apple orchards not yet in blossom, while behind them rose green hills alternating with rocky mountain crags, which had for their background the blue outlines of more distant mountains. The highest peak that we could see on this journey was the Pico Sacro,[228] whose pointed cone looks at a little distance somewhat the shape of Fugiama; the view from its summit amply rewards the climb. Some think that the name _Monte Sacro_ or _Pico Sacro_ is of earlier date than the introduction of Christianity into Galicia, and as this mountain has numerous dolmens and other prehistoric ruins on its slopes, it has been suggested that the Celts may have once made it a centre of their religious worship: even in our own day the peasants have many superstitious notions connected with it. Lopez Ferreiro wrote in 1868 that sick people used to take an offering of bread up to one of its high ridges, and leave it there after calling on the mountain to cure them with the following words:-- “Picosagro, Picosagro, Saname este mal que eu trago.” Molina, quoting Justin, says that the ancients considered it unlawful to touch this mountain with iron, and they had a tradition that great sheets of gold were found upon its surface; these were supposed to result from the fact that the mountain was constantly struck by lightning, which turned everything it touched into gold. Molina attributes another name that this mountain went by--_Mons acer_--to the violent tempests which raged around its cone, and which, he adds, “make the fortress that is built upon it quite uninhabitable.” Old documents bear witness to the fact that there was, in the eleventh century, a monastery upon one of its slopes, and that its church was called _San Sebastian del Pico Sacro_; on its summit there are still the ruins of a strong fortress built there by Archbishop Alonso Fonseca (1463-1506).[229]