Shillelagh Railway Station, Station Road, Shillelagh, Co. Wicklow

What was once the rear elevation, turned toward the road, is now effectively the front door for passers-by, while the true architectural front, the north façade of the building's larger wing, looks out instead over what was once railway land. The plan itself, a backward C-shape, only makes sense once you know it was built to serve trains rather than a household, with a smaller lean-to wing tucked to the south and a tall rubble wall that once ran alongside the track itself, now simply enclosing a garden.

The station was built in 1873, part of the network of lines that once threaded through County Wicklow, and it did the job it was designed for until the mid twentieth century, when rationalisation of the railways closed many such stations across the county. Around 1945 the building was converted into a private house, a fate shared by plenty of redundant stations but one that rarely left the structure so recognisably intact. The brickwork survives with its granite quoins and shaped eaves course, the north and east wings keep their slated hipped roofs and brick chimneystacks, and the two-over-two timber sash windows still sit in their original flat-headed openings with granite sills. Even the smaller lean-to wing, refinished in unpainted render with brick dressings and topped with artificial slate, reads as an addition rather than a disguise. A totally glazed porch was added to the panelled timber entrance around 1970, and the enclosing walls, one around the yard between the wings and one that used to shadow the railway line, are built of the same rough rubble that would have been familiar to waiting passengers over a century ago.

The wrought-iron carriage gates at the northern boundary date from around the 1940s, roughly the same period as the house's conversion, and mark the entrance to a garden that now wraps the whole property. Because the building sits back from the road with its old rear elevation facing outward, the layout can be disorienting for anyone trying to picture it as a working station; the platform side, the part that mattered most to the railway, is turned inward and away from view.