Glaslough Railway Station, New Line, Glaslough, Co. Monaghan

Triangular gables, oculus windows filled with leaded glass, carved bargeboards, cast-iron guttering; the whole structure reads as an exercise in Gothic Revival ornament applied, seemingly without economy, to a small provincial station.

The building dates from 1859 and follows a triple-pile plan, meaning three parallel roof sections run from north to south, each two bays wide, with the central section rising higher than its neighbours and stepping forward between a pair of porches. One of these porches, on the southern end, is false, added for symmetry rather than function. The walls are of hammer-dressed rubble limestone set on a moulded plinth, with sandstone used for the quoins and window surrounds; sandstone also forms the two chimneystacks on the ridges of the end piles, each rising from a squared base with corner colonettes to a pair of slender upper stacks finished with moulded cornices. The front elevation carries mullion-and-transom windows, two lights to each end pile and three to the taller centre, all set beneath relieving arches. The gable oculi are carved with quatrefoil tracery at the ends and a six-lobed sexfoil at the centre, while the porches themselves have trefoil-headed windows and, at the north end, a Tudor-arched inner doorway with chamfered stonework and a timber battened door still in place. A timber canopy shelters the platform side, though a later concrete block lean-to has been built against it. The southern bay of the building was set aside as a private waiting room for the Leslie family, whose seat at nearby Castle Leslie gave them, evidently, sufficient standing to warrant their own corner of the station.

Little of this ornamentation would have been necessary for a functioning halt on a rural line; stonemasons here were given scope to work in quatrefoils, colonettes, and chamfered mouldings well beyond what strict utility demanded, and the result is often ranked among the more accomplished small-town station buildings anywhere in Ireland.