Woodlawn Railway Station, Carrowmore, Co. Galway

The limestone used throughout is worked to a standard well above what a rural halt would normally warrant, with crazy-paving stonework to the stationmaster's house, coursed rubble to a lower western block, and squared rubble to the stationhouse proper, each wall treated slightly differently as though the building were showing off several ways of handling the same material at once.

The station was built in 1851 under the patronage of the second Baron Ashtown, whose involvement explains the ambition of the design; this was not a standard-issue railway building but one commissioned with a country house's sense of detail. The stationmaster's house, of three bays and two storeys, sits at right angles to a single-storey stationhouse, the two joined in a plan that still reads clearly today. Tudor-arch windows with diamond lights, chamfered stone surrounds, and hood-mouldings over the upper south gable point to a Gothic Revival vocabulary more often associated with churches or gate lodges than with railway infrastructure, while the offset four-stack chimneystack and catslide roof over the stationhouse add further individuality to the roofline. Decoratively carved bargeboards on the west gable and a cast-iron ogee gutter, supported on timber brackets shaped for the purpose, carry the same attention to detail around to the less public elevations. The complex was never conceived in isolation either; it forms part of a wider group of railway buildings at Woodlawn that includes a goods shed, a signal box and a run of railway cottages, together giving a sense of a self-contained railway settlement rather than a single structure dropped beside the tracks.

A timber canopy on decorative cast-iron brackets still shelters the platform elevation of the stationhouse, its ironwork resting on limestone corbels, and the original two-over-two pane timber sliding sash windows survive to the platform side. The blocked-up Tudor-arch entrance on the south gable of the stationmaster's house, retained behind its stone arch even though no longer in use, is worth a slow look, as is the buttress on the north gable, a practical addition that nonetheless keeps faith with the building's overall Gothic character.