Kilcrea Friary

Kilcrea Friary stands as a ruined graveyard near Ovens, County Cork, where Observant Franciscans built a defensible home for Cormac Láidir MacCarthy in the mid 15th century. English armies sacked the place repeatedly in the late 1500s, yet friars kept it alive until the 1620s. The stones still hold the buried MacCarthy and Art Ó Laoghaire, while the name preserves a story that Saint Cyra founded an earlier nunnery beside the Bride river.