Ballynahinch Railway Station, Cloonbeg, Co. Galway

Red brick walls are banded with black brick courses, window openings are trimmed with moulded brick surrounds and hood-mouldings, and the whole effect is one of a functional building that someone nonetheless took real trouble over. The combination of coloured brickwork and cast-iron canopy brackets, worked with an ornateness that goes well beyond what strict utility required, marks this out as a structure built to make an impression as much as to shelter passengers and freight.

Dating from around 1895, the building was originally a combined station and stationmaster's house, a common arrangement on Irish branch lines where a single structure did double duty as public transport hub and private residence. The two-storey house, with its front gable projecting slightly, is joined to a single-storey station building running back to the south-west, this in turn carrying a canted bay window and a projecting canopy over what would have been the platform. The canopy itself is held up on cast-iron brackets that rest on carved limestone corbels, a small flourish of engineering confidence typical of railway architecture in this period, when even modest rural stations were expected to advertise the modernity of the network they belonged to. Chimneystacks combine red brick lower sections with grey brick upper portions and rock-faced copings, while the gables carry exposed king-post roof trusses, a timber framing method using a central vertical post to support the roof ridge, and tooled limestone copings. A stained-glass oculus, a small round window, sits in the upper gable at the south-west end, one of the more delicate details on an otherwise robust building.

Traces of the site's working life remain legible even after conversion to private use, now known as Railway Lodge. A former signal box stood to the north and an engine shed to the south-west, positioning the house within a small complex of railway infrastructure rather than as an isolated building. The platform itself survives in part, its concrete coping still in situ alongside the house, a quiet reminder of the scale of commerce and travel that once passed through what is now a private residence.