Cahir Railway Station, Church Street, Cahir, Co. Tipperary

Approach from the road and Cahir's railway station reads as a solid two-storey presence, all gables and chimneystacks; walk round to the platform side and it drops to a single storey, tucked against the raised trackbed behind. It is a design solution to an awkward site, and a rather elegant one, using the change in ground level to give the station two quite different public faces without any loss of coherence between them.

The station was built in 1852 to a design by W.G. Murray, an architect working under William Dargan, the engineer whose name is attached to a large share of Ireland's early railway network. Murray gave the building a Gothic Revival treatment: a gable-fronted entrance bay with paired pointed-arch windows at ground level, pseudo-four-centred arches (a flattened, four-part curve typical of late Gothic work) used almost everywhere else, and a main doorway set beneath a shouldered arch with Dutch-style coping and moulded kneelers, the small stepped supports at the base of a gable that carry the coping stones. The walls are snecked cut limestone, meaning the stone is coursed but with blocks of varying size fitted tightly together rather than laid in even rows, and the windows keep their original quarry glazing, the small diamond-paned panes typical of the period, set against dressed limestone surrounds. At the rear, the roofline grows more complicated, with lean-to sections filling the gaps between projecting returns and chimneystacks in both chamfered limestone and red brick standing well proud of the ridge.

Little of this needs decoding to be appreciated; the contrast between the crisp ashlar stonework and the diamond quarry glazing is visible from the platform without any special knowledge, and the roofscape at the rear rewards a walk around the building rather than a glance from the forecourt. It stands among a small group of station buildings in the town that together form one of the more accomplished pieces of railway architecture from this phase of Irish line-building, and its condition means the original detailing, down to the timber battened doors and limestone thresholds, remains legible rather than guessed at.