The Corpus of ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE in Britain & Ireland
Elphin (medieval)
Cistercian House, former
The church at Boyle is one of the outstanding examples of Romanesque architecture in the country. It follows the so-called Fontenay plan, with a square presbytery flanked by two chapels in each arm of the transept. The church is well-preserved, though the walls of both nave aisles have been destroyed. The nave of eight bays has an unusual variety of pier forms: four Romanesque drum piers, eight shafted clustered piers, an octagonal pier, and six rectangular piers with triple shafts on the E and W faces. Scattered throughout the building there is an array of carved corbels, the majority furnished with some species of foliage ornament.
Little survives of the claustral buildings and there are no remains of the cloister arcades.
The sculpture is executed in a hard wearing sandstone, grey and yellow in colour, which was quarried locally.
Graveyard
A number of early cross inscribed slabs and architectural fragments from various periods built into the wall of the modern graveyard.
Graveyard
The remnants of two or possibly three ruined churches survive within the local graveyard. No Romanesque sculpture survives on site, but recorded drawings indicate that there were Romanesque fragments here formerly.