Saint Felim's College, Railway Road, Ballinamore, Co. Leitrim

It is an odd, satisfying thing to notice a former station master's house and its adjoining platform building doing quiet duty as a school and a private residence, their Victorian detailing intact under the change of use.

The building dates to around 1885, put up as the railway reached Ballinamore and needed both a station and a house for the man who ran it. The two structures were built as a pair: a detached two-bay, two-storey house for the station master, abutted by a long, single-storey station building of five bays. Their rooflines still show the confidence of the period, an M-profile slate roof over the house and a pitched slate roof over the station, both finished with terracotta ridge cresting and cast-iron guttering, the kind of ornamental flourish railway companies applied even to modest provincial stops. The polychromatic brickwork, that is, the deliberate patterning of different coloured bricks rather than a single uniform colour, was a fashionable technique in later Victorian building, and its appearance here has been noted as a genuine contribution to Ballinamore's architectural character, a touch of urban styling set down in a rural terminus. Chimneystacks are rendered and topped with terracotta pots, and the hood mouldings over the windows, worked in yellow brick, echo the same decorative language, even though the original window glazing has since been replaced with uPVC.

The house retains a small covered windbreak over its entrance, a pitched, tiled porch structure sheltering a timber glazed door with an overlight, a practical addition against Leitrim weather that has survived the building's conversion to other uses. A flat-roofed extension has been added to the rear, evidence of the premises adapting to serve as a school long after the trains themselves stopped defining its purpose. What remains valuable here is less the railway function, long since gone, than the physical record of it: a station master's house and its platform building still standing shoulder to shoulder, telling anyone who looks closely how a small Victorian railway stop chose to present itself, with a bit of colour and ornament, even at the edge of the network.