  A cyclic cover of the complex projective line branched at four appropriate
points has a natural structure of a square-tiled surface. We describe the
combinatorics of such a square-tiled surface, the geometry of the corresponding
Teichm\"uller curve, and compute the Lyapunov exponents of the determinant
bundle over the Teichm\"uller curve with respect to the geodesic flow. This
paper includes a new example (announced by G. Forni and C. Matheus in
\cite{Forni:Matheus}) of a Teichm\"uller curve of a square-tiled cyclic cover
in a stratum of Abelian differentials in genus four with a maximally degenerate
Kontsevich--Zorich spectrum (the only known example found previously by Forni
in genus three also corresponds to a square-tiled cyclic cover
\cite{ForniSurvey}).
  We present several new examples of Teichm\"uller curves in strata of
holomorphic and meromorphic quadratic differentials with maximally degenerate
Kontsevich--Zorich spectrum. Presumably, these examples cover all possible
Teichm\"uller curves with maximally degenerate spectrum. We prove that this is
indeed the case within the class of square-tiled cyclic covers.
