The old town mansion of the Sotomayor family is still preserved in Pontevedra, and their castle, the _Castillo de Mos_, is the only remaining example of a mediæval castle in Galicia: the latter is now the summer residence of the Marquis de la Viga de Armijo. We drove to it from Pontevedra in about two and a half hours, through beautiful and historic country. The bridge, _Puente de San Payo_, by which we crossed the river Verdugo, has given its name to the battlefield where Marshal Ney, at the head of seven thousand French troops, was utterly routed on 7th June 1809, by a force composed of rude undisciplined Gallegan peasants under the command of Noroña, and backed by some English marines. The peasants fought with anything that could be used as a weapon; in place of guns, they made rough catapults out of the trunks of oak trees, and formed a kind of battery under the direction of Colonel M’Kinley. Children still find skulls in this battlefield and in the surrounding country, and bring them in to Pontevedra as curios. The vines that we passed on the drive were trained, not over bamboos, but over rough granite columns, often nearly six feet in height; the hills were terraced with verdant steps as before, and there was an absence of all flatness and monotony; even the hedges round the gardens had changed to granite, so plentiful was that material. The people find it easier and cheaper to wall their fields and gardens with blocks of granite than to plant hedges. We passed stretches of land covered with the canary-coloured blossom of cabbages, others brilliant with some purple flower, others, again, with tall green grass mingled with hyacinths. On all sides the horizon was bounded by distant mountain peaks of a hazy blue, and the eye was free to travel unhindered over many a mile of cultivated hills and valleys. Here and there amongst the granite hedges would be a real English hedge of blackberries with familiar wild flowers in the grass below. The kilometres were marked by the quaintest of pointed milestones, which looked as if their proper place was a cemetery. In some of the ploughed patches, women with red handkerchiefs over their heads, and legs bare nearly to the knee, were busy sowing seed in the freshly ploughed furrows. The cottages were all of sparkling granite, and as solid in their build as if they had been cathedrals; in many a cottage garden we saw a lemon tree full of yellow fruit; presently we crossed the railway line, and near it a plantation of bamboos. Then a granite quarry came in view; a second time we crossed the railway and then came the river, its banks blazing with mica dust. Then came a village with a granite church and a schoolhouse; the road itself has been hewn out of granite rocks; boulders covered with moss and with ferns in their crannies formed the sides of the road; now we had reached the top of a hill covered with chestnut trees, whose bright green foliage was lit up by the powerful sun, and from this point of