Athenry Railway Station, Station Road, Athenry, Co. Galway

The building's symmetry gives it away as something designed rather than merely built: end bays flat-roofed and blank, the bays beside them advanced and pedimented, and at the centre a colonnaded canopy on cast-iron columns sheltering the platform side. It is the kind of detail, keystones over the windows, modillions (small decorative brackets) under the pediment cornices, terracotta ornament worked into the front gable, that suggests a company with money to spend and a point to make.

That company was the Midland Great Western Railway, which built the station in 1851 as its line pushed west through Galway. Rail companies of the period often used architecture as advertisement, and a well dressed station in a small town signalled permanence and ambition as much as it served passengers. Athenry's version leans on cut stone rather than raw expense: tooled limestone quoins and a plinth run along the five middle bays, the round-headed door on the entrance front has a carved limestone surround, and the platform side carries square-headed doorways with their own decorative surrounds and a glazed timber double-leaf door. Cast-iron rainwater goods and ornamental brackets under the canopy round out a building that was clearly meant to be looked at, not just used.

The station no longer serves its original purpose in this particular structure, having been adapted for use as a computer training centre, though its form survives largely intact, from the pitched slate roof and rendered chimneystacks down to the replacement timber windows set into the original segmental and square-headed openings. It remains, along with the other railway structures grouped at Athenry, one of the more complete surviving statements of mid-nineteenth-century railway architecture in County Galway, built at a moment when a modest country station could still be given the full treatment of pediments, colonnades and carved stone.