Glenfarne Railway Station, Glenfarne, Co. Leitrim

Beside it, an unassuming corrugated-iron shed carries the old designation "Customs and Excise", a small but pointed reminder that this was once a border crossing point for goods as well as people, on a railway line that ran through territory later divided by partition.

The station was built around 1870 for the Sligo, Leitrim and Northern Counties Railway, a line that connected the Atlantic port town of Sligo with the industrial hinterland around Enniskillen, threading through Leitrim's lakes and drumlins. The single-storey building follows the architectural form typical of stations along this line, snecked stone walls, meaning roughly coursed rubble with tooled quoins at the corners, and segmental-headed openings, that is, openings topped with a shallow curved arch rather than a flat lintel, framed in tooled sandstone. The windows kept their timber sashes and the door its ironwork, while cast-iron downpipes, decorative rather than strictly functional, ran down from the roof. Ashlar chimneystacks, built from smooth dressed stone rather than the rougher rubble below, complete a building that was clearly meant to make a small architectural statement even in a rural setting. The station survives with a group of related railway structures still standing around it, evidence of a working complex rather than an isolated building, though it is currently undergoing conversion into a house, with a substantial two-bay two-storey addition built onto the west end of the original structure.

Anyone visiting should expect a working building site rather than a preserved monument; the addition to the west has already altered the profile of the original single-storey block, and the platform and Customs and Excise shed to the east are the clearest surviving clues to what the site once was, worth pausing over before the ongoing works change the picture further.