Enniscorthy Railway Station, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford

The roofline oversails the walls slightly, a small detail that softens the building's otherwise strict rectilinear form. It is the kind of quiet architectural trick that rewards a second glance rather than announcing itself.

The station opened in 1863 as part of the extension of the Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford Railway line, and its design is attributed to George Wilkinson, a Dublin-based architect working through the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Wilkinson's hand is recognisable here in the same way it is at Gorey railway station further up the line: a compact, four-bay, two-storey block built around a restrained central doorcase, with the emphasis placed on discipline of composition rather than ornament. The platform elevation, facing west, carries this arrangement across its full width, with a hipped slate roof, clay ridge tiles and brick chimney stacks rising from granite cushion courses that have taken on a coating of lichen over the years. Cast-iron rainwater goods, some with octagonal or ogee-shaped hoppers, survive along the eaves, sitting above exposed timber rafters and eaves boards that give the roofline its distinctive weight.

The building's walls are finished in a grit-dashed roughcast render sitting on a plinth, and the camber-headed window openings, though refitted with uPVC casements in place of the original two-over-two timber sashes, retain their cut-granite sills and bull-nosed rendered surrounds. The central door, similarly camber-headed, keeps its timber mullions and panelled glazed door flanked by sidelights beneath an overlight, a fairly formal treatment for what is, in essence, a functional railway building. The station stands within its own grounds, enclosed by a coursed rubble stone boundary wall finished with a soldier course coping, a boundary that has outlasted much of the change to the building itself and still marks out the plot as it would have appeared to passengers arriving in the 1860s.