Ullard Church

On the site of an early monastery founded by St Fiacre in the sixth century, a few kilometres north of Graiguenamanagh, Ullard Church is a granite nave and choir standing by the 12th century and entered, as it was then, through its Romanesque west doorway. The doorway has three orders, a tympanum and a hood moulding with decorated bosses ending in two large beast heads, and at the gable's apex a carved stone shows two figures believed to be St Moling and St Fiacre. Inside, the choir arch was rebuilt plain after a fire brought down its upper part, the old chevron and floral mouldings still beside the fire marks, and a stair turns from straight to spiral inside the wall to the belfry. Behind the church stands a four-metre granite high cross, rebuilt from three pieces, carved with the Crucifixion, David and Goliath and Adam and Eve. Reviewers single out the doorway, and note horses grazing in the fields around a quiet, well-kept graveyard.