Carlingford Railway Station, Carlingford, Co. Louth

Yet these whimsical flourishes crown the former railway station at Carlingford, a building whose working life as a station lasted less than eighty years but whose architectural ambition has outlasted the trains by a considerable margin.

Built in 1876, the station was laid out on an H-plan, seven bays long and a single storey high, with pitched slate roofs and crested ridge tiles adding further texture to the skyline. The walls combine rock-faced limestone with ashlar sandstone quoins and plaques, a deliberate contrast of colour and texture that, together with the relieving arches over the window openings, gives the building a distinctly Tudor Revival character, a nineteenth-century taste for reviving the arched openings and decorative masonry of Tudor-period architecture, often applied to railway buildings to lend them a sense of solidity and status. Square-headed windows retain their timber sliding sashes, and the doorways keep their original four-panel timber doors beneath flat-arched sandstone lintels. When the railway line through Carlingford closed in 1952, the station building did not fall into decline, as so many did elsewhere; instead it was adapted for new use, a rare case of a redundant transport structure being kept in active civic life rather than left to decay or demolition.

Today the building serves as a tourist office, its position by the municipal car park giving it a clear outlook over the sea to the east, with public toilets tucked into the north elevation. The quality of the materials and the flair of the detailing, from the contrasting limestone and sandstone to the ornamental chimney pots, reward a slower look than most visitors passing through on other business would think to give it.