Ås kyrka

The church's history is bound up with Ås kloster, a Cistercian monastery founded in 1194 as an offshoot of the Danish Sorø abbey. The monastery was closed in the sixteenth century and destroyed during the Count's Feud of 1535. According to local tradition, the last abbot of Ås kloster became the first Protestant parish priest serving Ås and Veddige, though this account cannot be independently confirmed.

The age of the present building is uncertain; it may date from the sixteenth century, and its western end is thought to incorporate remnants of an earlier medieval church. The building was extended eastward in the eighteenth century, later gained a three-sided chancel, and the west tower was added in 1804, its inscription recording the year of construction under Gustav IV Adolf. A sacristy was built to the east in 1884 to designs by Fritz Eckert. Repeated rebuilding and restoration, particularly a neoclassical remodelling of both exterior and interior in the 1880s, mean that little of the church's original character survives.

Decorative wall paintings from the eighteenth century survive around the windows and doorways; these were uncovered during a 1931 restoration and used as the basis for the interior's colour scheme. The wooden ceiling was also once painted, but when it was removed in the late nineteenth century the boards were sold at auction and reused as building material elsewhere; only a few fragments, mostly blue-painted, remain, kept in the tower.

Inside, the altarpiece and pulpit, decorated with carved figures of the four evangelists, are in a neo-Gothic style dating from the 1880s. During the 1931 restoration, a carved figure of Saint Luke—salvaged from an earlier pulpit—was incorporated into the current one; other remnants of that older pulpit and altarpiece are now held at the Varberg museum, along with a fragment of a carved Christ figure from a processional crucifix thought to date from around 1350. The wooden font is a twentieth-century piece, but its brass basin dates from around 1600. A cash chest from 1768 and a bridal pew from the same century, both restored in 1931, are also of interest.

Both of the church's bells were recast by the Gothenburg founder Arwid Böök, in 1729 and 1739 respectively, and carry inscribed verses. The church organ has a mixed history: an 1833 instrument was replaced in 1886 by one built by Salomon Molander & Co., whose facade survives despite later tonal alterations and renovations in the twentieth century.