At the top of the path a moss-grown cross at the foot of a flight of broken stone steps, hard by a crumbling archway, marks the beginning of one of the several pilgrimages of the Cross scattered through the woods, a lichen-covered slab upon the cross recording that: “These two hermitages of the pilgrimage of the Cross were built by order of the Illustrious João de Melo, Bishop and Count, in the year 1694.” The little hermitages stand almost intact, though their thick walls are all overgrown with bright mosses and reaching arms of verdure. Passing beneath the archway, shadowed by a mighty cedar, I find myself at the foot of this Via Sacra, a steep ascent with green and crumbling steps before each open shrine of the Passion every hundred yards or so. The shrines, little quaint square buildings, with the window-like opening breast high, and a kneeling-stone before each, are all dismantled and empty now; though with their cloak of foliage and ferns and their lichen-clothed slabs telling the scene of the sacred Passion which used to be exhibited inside, they are perhaps more beautiful so than ever they were. Weeks after, when I saw at Caldas, in course of construction, some very fine sacred groups in enamelled earthenware, the figures half life-size, and was told that these scenes of the Passion were intended by the Government for the restoration of the shrines at Bussaco, I breathed a silent hope that, though the groups might be replaced, no attempt would be made to restore to newness the shrines themselves.
As one trod the old path of the pilgrimage, up mossy steps and past despoiled shrines, with glimpses of sunlit glades and shady green dells, it was impossible to shut away from one’s thoughts those generations of silent white-clad figures, who, shoeless, had toiled so often up the Via Dolorosa, with tears of penitence, perhaps agonies of regret, for the life from which they had fled. All around were relics of their unrecorded labour. Sculptured stones, chapels, hermitages, fountains, grottoes, and shrines were all built by their patient hands; paths scarped on steep hillsides, seats placed in quiet nooks for the meditative and the weary, nay, the trees and plants from all lands growing so proudly now had all been tended anxiously by the same dumb shadows that for centuries waited for death within the walls enclosing the sacred wood. If ever a place was haunted by sad, harmless ghosts, these paths of pilgrimage at Bussaco must still be thronged by the white-robed phantoms of those who made them.