Attymon Railway Station, Attymon, Co. Galway

Attymon's railway buildings sit in exactly that state: intact enough in outline to read clearly as a working station, disused long enough that the windows are sealed and the render is failing, and grouped closely enough with their bridge, goods store and platform that the whole ensemble still explains itself to anyone who stops to look.

The station was built around 1890, when the Midland Great Western Railway opened the Dunsandle spur off its Dublin to Galway line. This was the era when factory-made brick, and coloured brick in particular, had become cheap and fashionable enough to appear on rural infrastructure that earlier decades might have built in plain stone. Attymon shows that taste plainly: red brick walls with black brick used for the block-and-start surrounds around the window and door openings, a pattern of contrasting colour picked out around each square-headed opening, and tooled limestone sills beneath. The five-bay station building carried a pitched slate roof and rendered red brick chimneystacks, with a single-bay block against its south gable that survives only in part. Its most distinctive feature, the veranda, was formed simply by extending the eaves of the roof outwards over the platform, the overhang carried on cast-iron posts set on stone plinths, a common enough device on lines of this period but one that still gives the building most of its character now that its windows are gone. Across the tracks, a two-bay goods shed of the same red brick and slate construction stands with wrought-iron wall ties and segmental-arch openings finished in red brick voussoirs, a curved arrangement of shaped bricks that spreads the load above an opening without the need for a stone lintel; a fragment of its multiple-pane metal-framed window remains in place. To the west, the rendered remains of the platform that served the Dunsandle spur can still be traced.

What survives at Attymon is not a single building but a working arrangement, station, veranda, goods shed and platform, still legible as the parts of a branch-line stop even in poor repair. It is that completeness of layout, rather than any single feature, that makes the group worth seeking out.