Holycross Church

Freestanding Board of First Fruits Church of Ireland church, built 1821, comprising three-bay side elevations to nave, with three-stage castellated and pinnacled tower to west and lower sacristy to north with cut-stone chimneystack and with recent flat-roofed extension. Now in use as offices. Pitched slate roofs. Roughly-coursed snecked limestone walls with string courses and corbel tables to tower and with cut stone copings to gables. Traceried pointed-arch window openings with hood-mouldings above. Louvred windows to upper stage of tower. Pointed-arch doorway with hood-moulding and with timber battened door and overlight. Clock faces with hood-mouldings to three elevations of tower. Plaques to interior and gallery at west end. Graveyard around building with rubble boundary walls to site with square piers with wrought-iron gates.

The simple form of this church is articulated by the quality of the craftsmanship of the stonework. It is located on an elevated site, and constitutes a landmark in a mainly rural landscape. The church may contain fabric from an earlier church on the site and the whole lies within an early ecclesiastical enclosure. This building therefore forms part of a sequence of ecclesiastical structures at Holycross of which the enclosure is the first element, the abbey the second, this church the third and the now disused Catholic church the fourth.