To our right, just before we reached the bridge, we came to a tall sculptured stone cross raised upon four steps of stone; this cross dates from the fifteenth century. The sculpture is well preserved; on the lower part are the figures of three monks, each looking in a different direction; they wear the garb of “Benedictine,” “Dominican,” and “Franciscan” respectively. Galicia is full of such crosses, as England was once. In the Middle Ages a stone crucifix often stood in the place of an oratory. In many districts scarcely yet cleared from the forest a cross raised in the middle of a field was enough to satisfy the devotion of the Anglo-Saxon thane,[241] his ploughmen and shepherds; they gathered round it for public and daily prayer in places where churches were scarce. Laurel bushes in full flower and with a very small leaf adorned the bank, and sprang from crevices in the bulwarks of the bridge. This bridge had, originally, pointed Gothic arches built in the fifteenth century, but when it was restored in the nineteenth the new arches were made semicircular. In my photograph the old pointed arches are clearly distinguishable among the others;[242] half way across we looked down over the parapet upon an old apple tree that sprang out of the brickwork of the breakwaters which were built on the eastern side, like the pointed prows of ships, to cut the force of the torrent-fed river; on the western side the breakwaters were square, and washed only by the gentle sea-tides of the ria. Ascending the farther bank after we had crossed the bridge, we came to a large village, the very one that Professor Dogson of Oxford walked out to from Noya, that he might gather and examine the names of the villagers with a view to proving their Basque origin.[243] A little higher up on the slope of the hill is a village named Argalo, after a king of the Greeks, the fifth king of Lacedemonia, about 1400 B.C., and founded by Greek settlers at a little later date.[244] Aguiar asserts that in no part of the Peninsula are there more traces of Greek colonies than in Portugal and Galicia. There are thousands of Greek names still to be found in Galicia, names of towns, mountains, and rivers, such as Agra, Melante, Berroea, Berta, Boea, Bura, Camara, Cardia, Cella, Cora, Naron, Samos, Lais, Pindo, and Caspindo. The Gallegan name for maize bread is _broa_, which is also a Greek word. Two of the three generals who confronted the Romans in the north of Spain were Leucon and Megara. The custom of wrestling naked on festive occasions was derived by the Gallegan villagers from Greek colonists, and preserved up to the middle of the nineteenth century.