Cloghjordan Railway Station, Cloghjordan, Co. Tipperary

Every other opening in the building has been blocked up, leaving a facade that reads, at a glance, as a solid wall interrupted by the ghost of former doors and windows rather than a working building. It is an odd kind of survival, a station that has kept its shape and its stonework while losing the function that shaped it.

Built in 1863, the station at Cloghjordan was raised at a point when the town supported a market busy enough to justify the investment, and the building itself was designed to look the part. The central block runs to four bays, with its middle bays recessed on the track-side elevation, and lower two-bay wings extend from each end, one of them terminating in a square-plan structure. The roofs are hipped and slated, with rendered chimneystacks rising above them, and the walls combine render with ashlar limestone quoins and plinths, the crisp cut stone at the corners and base contrasting with the smoother surface between. Door openings on the track-side of the main block are round-headed with moulded render surrounds, while the wings have segmental-headed doors, meaning arched but with a shallower curve, framed in ashlar block-and-start work, a technique alternating projecting and flush stone blocks around the opening. The station was never conceived alone: it forms one part of a wider railway complex, standing alongside the stationmaster's house, a goods shed, and a railway bridge, and its hipped roof, paired chimneystacks, and segmental-headed openings echo the design of the stationmaster's house closely enough that the two buildings read as a matched pair.

Approach to the site is still marked by its original boundary treatment: a rubble stone wall with ashlar piers runs along the north end of the station grounds, and the entrance from the public road is framed by a rubble stone wall with rusticated ashlar piers, their surfaces deliberately roughened for texture, along with cast-iron lattice gates and a stile. Together these details give a sense of how deliberately the whole approach to the station was composed, from the gateposts to the platform elevation, even though the building today no longer serves the trade and travel it was built for.