Bus Eireann Capwell, Summer Hill South, Cork City, Co. Cork

Look closer at this seven-bay building on the edge of Cork city and the giveaway details emerge: the rusticated quoins, the blocked doorways with their limestone hood mouldings, the pattern of openings that has nothing to do with buses at all. This was once a railway station, and its bones remain stubbornly, elegantly railway-shaped beneath its later use.

The building dates from around 1879, when it served as the terminus of the direct line running from Cork to Macroom. That line was one thread in a rail network that once reached into corners of Ireland long since given over to road transport, and stations like this one were built with a confidence that assumed permanence. The architecture bears this out. Red brick walls are set off by grey limestone string courses and quoins, with a hipped slate roof and brick chimneystacks finished in carved limestone eaves. Ground floor windows are round-headed with moulded brick reveals, while the first floor takes square-headed openings, the two storeys reading as a deliberate architectural conversation rather than mere repetition. Flat-roofed wings flank the main block to east and west, and the original door openings, now sealed, still carry their limestone hood mouldings as a trace of how passengers once entered.

The Cork-Macroom line itself has gone the way of so many rural Irish railways, its trains and timetables long since replaced, but the terminus survives by adaptation rather than demolition. It now functions as offices, its uPVC windows a practical if unglamorous concession to modern use, slotted into openings clearly designed for something else. What makes the building worth pausing over is this layering of purpose: a structure built to move people out of Cork toward Macroom, now static, repurposed, and still legible as a station to anyone who knows to look past the signage and the parked buses toward the brick and limestone underneath.