Collooney Railway Station, Collooney, Co. Sligo

This oculus, ringed by a painted moulded surround, sits below a semi-circular timber canopy carried on moulded brackets, and together they give the doorway a formality out of proportion to the modest scale of the building around it. The station is a compact four-bay, two-storey structure in squared-and-snecked rock-faced limestone, its walls dressed with tooled quoins and its square-headed windows set in ashlar block-and-start surrounds. It is the kind of workmanlike Victorian stonework that rewards a second look, precise without being showy.

The building dates to around 1890, part of the expansion of Ireland's rail network into the northwest during that period. Its hipped slate roof, finished with clay hip and ridge tiles, is punctuated by three smooth-rendered corbelled chimneystacks along the west wall, corbelling being the technique of stepping courses of masonry outward to support the stack above. A single-storey lean-to extension was added to the west and a waiting room to the north, both practical accretions to a building otherwise little altered from its original form. The timber door, with its nine raised-and-fielded panels, and the painted timber casement windows both appear to date from around 1980, a sympathetic restoration decade after the station's construction, while the uPVC windows on the lean-to are a more recent, and more utilitarian, addition from around 2000. Flanking the site are further working reminders of the railway's operational past: a platform to the east and an engine shed to the south, the latter once presumably housing locomotives serviced along this line.

The approach itself is worth noting. A long driveway leads in from the north, running alongside a battered retaining wall, meaning one that slopes inward as it rises, built in the same coursed squared limestone as the station and finished with crenellated coping along its top edge. The effect is of a small approach given a certain civic dignity, as though the railway company wanted arriving passengers to sense they were entering somewhere of consequence before they ever reached the platform.