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The illustration shows the three stages of trefoiled arches, the two lower with coupled colonnettes. The lowest has caryatid figures of a warrior and a civilian in front of the angles to the west.
It has a trefoiled head; with a round moulding at the angle resting on the capitals of thin shafts. Beyond a broad hollow over which straggles a very realistic and thick-stemmed plant is a large round moulding springing from larger shafts and concentric with the inner.
The great simplicity of the building notwithstanding it can scarcely be as old as the thirteenth century: the curious way in which the two lancet lights of the aisle windows are enclosed under one larger trefoiled arch recalls the similar windows in the church at Leça do Balio near Oporto begun in 1336, though there the elliptical head of the enclosing arch is much less satisfactory than the trefoiled head here used.
They form four more or less trefoiled spaces with wavy outlines, and two of them not the remaining one at the top end in large well-carved vine-leaves, very like those at the ends of the cusps on the arches in the Capella do Fundador at Batalha.
The buttresses rise to the parapets without diminishing in breadth or projection an early feature, and three large rolls or beads are worked upon their edge. Those that flank the portal have each a large niche at the bottom, with engaged shafts, and the head and dripstone trefoiled. At the corners of the façade, where the staircases are, the buttresses are triple.
The apse displays in the lower storey a round-headed unglazed window like those along the south wall, and in the upper storey a small round-headed light at the south side and a larger window in the middle, of the same size as that below, but not so deeply splayed, and with the head rudely trefoiled.
These are absent on the east. The north transept differs from the south in the following respects: The arches of the arcade at the north end of the north transept are trefoiled. They are plain at the south end of the south. The main piers of the north transept have a ridge running down their alternate stone shafts. This ridge is wanting in the south.
Each is worked into a small trefoiled arch, with an incision round it to mark its outline, and another slight incision above, expressing the angle of the first cutting.
The second, in the stable-yard of the adjoining manor house, is the refectory, a good, vaulted apartment, with a row of octagonal columns down the centre. At the W. end it opens into the kitchen, in which will be discovered a fireplace. Of the priory church, which abutted on the N. wall of the so-called "chapter house," nothing is left but a single trefoiled piscina and one of the vaulting shafts.
Here the horseshoe cuspings are on the out-most of the five orders of mouldings, and the chevron on the fourth, while there is also a series of pointed cusps on the second. Only the innermost betrays its really late origin by the curious crossing and interpenetrating of the mouldings of its large trefoiled head.
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