The crowds massed amid fortified villages and stone roadside crosses.
There was a sprinkling of roadside crosses and the bocage, the thick hedges along the roadsides, could hardly have been more bosky.
On a misty morning among the green hills and valleys, beside one of the characteristic granite roadside crosses, you could be forgiven for thinking you'd strayed into Ireland.
This stunning land of crumpled prairie, horse pastures turned tawny in the autumn and sunflower farms is marred by an astonishing number of roadside crosses and gang tags sprayed on houses, stores and abandoned buildings, giving rural Indian communities an inner-city look.
Dr. Fernando Bayardo, director of the Española Hospital emergency room, called overdoses "only a small fraction of the deaths and disease caused by substance abuse," which include liver disease and blood infections as well as car accidents, marked by omnipresent roadside crosses bedecked with plastic flowers.
Churches at Leathley and Beckwithshaw were exceptionally busy, the centre of Ripon was taken-over by the parade and there was a smaller version at the roadside memorial cross in Killinghall.
It also brings them in close range with where vehicles are and risks collisions when deer hang around the roadside and cross roads.
Common engineering countermeasures to improve roadside safety include: cross section improvements, hazard removal or modification, and delineation.
Since then they have spread and bred, and the sight of a boar rootling on a roadside verge or crossing a footpath is no longer extraordinary.
Streets are still sprinkled with roadside shrines, black crosses painted on lampposts, and a makeshift memorial for the several hundred women among those killed.
