We were at last nearing Noya; women were at work in the fields; they wore very short skirts, hardly below the knees, and wide-brimmed yellow straw hats with a band of black ribbon round the low crown; the men also wore this kind of hat, the manufacture of which is the special industry of one of the Noya villages. A young peasant woman met us as she was leading her oxen home. She was as upright as a young pine; perhaps her queenly bearing was a result of carrying burdens on her head, and certainly Gallegan women do hold themselves remarkably well. At a bend in the road we caught sight of the sea for a moment in the direction of Cape Finisterre. The scenery remained beautiful and rugged till we had reached the bottom of the wide valley in which Noya lies. In front of one of the cottages we saw a quaint sight,--a cottager was mounted on a ladder with a mortar trowel in his hand doing something to the roof, while beneath him, motionless as a statue, stood a tall woman supporting on her broad-brimmed hat the board from which the man helped himself to mortar. Here was another use to which the head of a Gallegan woman could be put.
The coach drew up in a sort of village green, near a fountain, and in front was the public walk, or Alameda. The first thing that attracts a stranger’s attention is a bust of Noya’s
famous sculptor, Filipe de Castro,[238] which is placed on the top of a tall pedestal and forms a sort of landmark for visitors. The houses of Noya are built of granite; I noticed that some of them had not only tiled roofs but also tiled walls. “To keep the wet out,” I was told.
The first church we visited was that of _Santa Maria a Nova_, which is the oldest church in Noya, and dates from the year 1327. Its cemetery contains many interesting horizontal gravestones, on which are cut the insignia of the office of the persons buried beneath them. On one we found a stone-mason’s hammer.
On the outer side of the right wall are three sarcophagi in arched recesses. The inscription on one is Era MCCC, which is equivalent to A.D. 1272; these are thought to have belonged to an earlier church, for the present one was completely rebuilt in the fourteenth century. I noticed one sarcophagus that rested on two stone lions, and had represented on its sides a bridge, and fish swimming beneath the name of the person buried there. In front of the church, in the little graveyard, is a sarcophagus with the recumbent effigy of a warrior with his sword by his side; he wears a tall fur-brimmed hat and a kind of kilt which is a curious example of the costume of his day.