Gorey Railway Station, Gorey, Co. Wexford

Ground floor openings are generous, first floor ones noticeably smaller, so that the whole facade seems to taper upward even though the walls do not. It is a deliberate trick of proportion rather than an accident of construction, and combined with a roofline that oversails its walls just slightly, it gives an otherwise compact, boxy building a surprising amount of visual tension for something built to process tickets and timetables.

The station opened in 1863 as part of the extension of the Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford Railway line, a company that was steadily stitching the east coast together with rail during the mid nineteenth century. Its design is attributed to George Wilkinson, a Dublin-based architect of the period, and the building at Gorey shares an architectural family resemblance with his station at Enniscorthy: the same compact rectangular plan, the same red brick, the same graduated fenestration and gently overhanging roof. Wilkinson clearly had a formula he trusted, and Gorey is one of the clearer surviving expressions of it, valued not for any single flourish but for how consistently the whole composition holds together as a piece of functional Victorian design.

The building itself is a plain three-bay, two-storey block on a rectangular footprint, built in red brick laid in the English Garden Wall bond, a bricklaying pattern that alternates courses of headers and stretchers in a set ratio for strength and appearance. Square-headed window openings are trimmed with cut-granite sills and red brick voussoirs, the curved wedge-shaped bricks that frame an opening, though the original two-over-two timber sash windows have since been replaced with timber casements. The hipped slate roof carries lichen-covered clay ridge tiles and rendered wallhead chimney stacks to the north, their chamfered bases and capped tops still holding their terracotta pots, while the rainwater goods have been renewed in uPVC. Out on the platform, the flagged surface is edged with cut-granite coping with a beaded, or rounded, edge profile, a small but tactile detail underfoot for anyone waiting on a train.