Clara Railway Station, New Road, Clara, Co. Offaly

When Clara's station opened in 1859, both the Midland Great Western Railway and the Great Southern and Western Railway ran services through it, an arrangement that speaks to the competitive tangle of lines criss-crossing the midlands in the mid nineteenth century, each company laying track and building stations in a rush to connect towns before its rivals did.

The building itself is a fairly typical example of the railway architecture of that period, though no less handsome for it. Ashlar limestone walls, cut and tooled to a smooth finish, rise in four bays across two storeys, with quoins marking the corners and matching tooled surrounds framing the timber sash windows and the segmental-headed door. What lifts the design above the merely functional are the tall red brick chimneystacks, their warm colour set deliberately against the cool grey stone, and the flanking walls to either side built in a restrained Palladian manner, screening walls with arched openings that give the whole composition a sense of order and symmetry. A slate canopy, held up on timber Doric columns, a plainer classical order without ornate capitals, still shelters part of the platform, and the hipped slate roof with its oversailing eaves and terracotta chimney pots completes a building clearly designed to impress arriving passengers as much as to shelter them.

The station survives as part of a wider group that includes a water tower and a railway bridge, all still doing the job they were built for. It remains in operation, carrying passengers through Clara in County Offaly much as it has done since the line first opened, a working piece of Victorian infrastructure rather than a preserved curiosity behind glass.