These mountain ramparts, pierced with their deep natural posterns, are a most characteristic feature of the Castilian frontiers; and probably that “Land of Castles” owes its name as much to{283} them as to its man-built donjons and citadels. Indeed, it requires no very vivid imagination to discover the outlines of towers and battlements among the sheer bare weather-beaten stones. One magnificent imitation overshadowed our road in the Serranía of Cuenca, with keep and watch-tower and ballium as complete as a Château Gaillard. Another more ambiguous specimen we caught sight of in this very district;—one of those isolated conical hills crowned with a square rocky tooth, which are not uncommon in the neighbourhood of Pamplona. First it seemed that it was a rock,—then that it was a castle; and the balance of probability appeared to change every half mile. The road led straight up to our landmark and circled around the base, so that we saw it fairly close, and from three different sides; but whether it was really a rock or a castle we are not quite positive even to this day. There can be little doubt that it is to some of these Fate Morgane that we owe the old proverb concerning castles in Spain.
The northern face of the Montes Obarenes is much more broken than the southern; and as we run down from the pass into the pretty little town of Miranda, we may see, far away on our right,{284} that other great notch to the eastward where the Ebro forces its passage out into the Rioja plains. The Ebro is but young up here in the Vizcayan highlands; yet it is already a fine broad river; and the massive old stone bridge of Miranda, flanked by quaint houses and churches, makes a singularly attractive sample of Spanish scenery to the tourist newly arrived from Bayonne.
The river breaks through the mountains some ten miles lower, by a gap between two rocky headlands, known as the cliffs of Bilibio and Buradon; and beyond are the tawny undulating plains around Haro,—a famous wine-growing district, whose vintages usually reach the English market under the name of Bordeaux, though they taste just as good under their own. The view (given in the illustrations as La Rioja Alavesa) is one which is very typical of Spanish inland scenery. But a special local touch is given by the Navarrese villages bunched together at the tops of their conical hills, like so many hedgehogs with their bristles out. Navarre was a buffer state in medieval times, and anyone who had nothing else to do used to kill time by invading it. The Navarrese villages were always upon the defensive,{285} and evidently acquired the habit of arranging themselves to suit.
Meanwhile our road to Pamplona keeps still to the northward of the mountains, and, crossing the Ebro at Miranda, makes straight for the heights of Puebla and Morillas, which answer to the Montes Obarenes on the opposite side of the vale. The little river Zadora comes rippling out to meet us; and the gap from which it issues admits us into a wide level basin some ten miles in diameter, to which the Zadora itself forms a somewhat irregular chord. The ground on the left bank of the river rises considerably higher than on the right, and culminates in a little shaggy knoll which stands close beside our road. Watch for it, and do not pass it unnoticed; it is the “Englishmen’s Hill.” Well has it earned that name, for it has been twice baptized in the blood of our nation. Once when a detachment of the Black Prince’s army, under the command of Sir Thomas Felton, fell fighting valiantly against thirty times their number on the eve of the battle of Navarrete.[62] Again when Picton’s “fighting devils” came like a storm{286} against it in the crisis of the battle of Vitória, cutting their path through the centre of King Joseph’s tottering array.