Kilcrea

Kilcrea is a ruined Franciscan friary near Ovens, County Cork, built in 1465 by Cormac Láidir MacCarthy on the grounds of an earlier nunnery founded by Saint Cyra. English armies sacked it repeatedly from 1542 onward, yet friars remained until the 1620s, and the burial ground has never stopped receiving the dead. MacCarthy himself was killed in battle in 1494 and lies beneath the choir, beside Art Ó Laoghaire, whose widow Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill mourned with a lament still spoken today. The narrow tower rises through steep winding stairs above dormitories and kitchens now open to the sky, while the Bride river valley holds the shape of a settlement long abandoned.