Lobster Cottage, Courtmacsherry, Co. Cork

Beneath the ordinary business of domestic life, the timber clapper boarding, carved bargeboards and red brick chimneystacks are the fingerprints of a railway company working fast and cheap with the industrial materials of its day: mass produced red brick, corrugated iron, timber board. The result was never meant to be permanent architecture in the grand sense, yet here it still stands, its origins legible in every plank.

The building began life in 1891 as a station on the line extended that year to Courtmacsherry, on the west Cork coast, with a further stretch pushed on to the pier the following year in 1892. This was the kind of short branch line that proliferated across rural Ireland in the late nineteenth century, built quickly and cheaply to connect small harbour towns to the wider rail network, using precisely the prefabricated, low-cost materials the station itself now demonstrates. The line carried its regular traffic for over half a century before that trade ceased in 1947, and the tracks themselves were lifted for good in 1961, leaving the station building without a function until it was converted into a house.

What survives is a single-storey structure of three bays, its slate roof still carrying the original chimneystacks and bargeboards, with cast-iron rainwater goods completing the period detailing. A later extension to the west and a conservatory to the front mark its adaptation to domestic life, the extension distinguished by rendered rather than timber-clad walls, and the window openings, though square-headed and fitted with their original timber sills, now hold replacement uPVC casements. It is a modest building, but a legible one: a small station on a small branch line, still wearing the materials that were once thought disposable enough for a railway and durable enough, it turns out, to outlast the railway itself.