Clonhugh Railway Station, Ballynafid, Co. Westmeath

It is the kind of detail that survives when a building outlives its purpose, a small act of permanence on a structure that has spent longer as a private home than it ever did as a working station. The gable-fronted house of snecked limestone, its rusticated quoins catching the light differently to the wall behind them, sits close to the shores of Lough Owel, and were it not for that inscription and the proportions of the place, a passer-by might not guess it had once welcomed trains at all.

It was built around 1855 for the Midland and Great Western Railway Company, part of the line pushed out from Mullingar towards Sligo that reached Longford town that same year. The station closed in 1947, one of many small rural halts that fell out of use as railway traffic contracted across the midlands in the mid-twentieth century. What makes the building worth a second look is its construction: snecked limestone, laid in the irregular coursing typical of the technique, over a chamfered plinth, with three moulded brick chimneystacks rising above the roofline. The contrast between the pale brick of the stacks and the grey stone below is deliberate rather than accidental, a small flourish of design on what was otherwise a functional building. The station may have been designed by George Wilkinson, an architect responsible for a number of Midland and Great Western stations in the area during this period, though the attribution is not certain. After closure the building was adapted for domestic use and was, for a time, occupied by the wife of the station's last master, a quiet thread of continuity between the working railway and its afterlife as a house.

Much of the original fabric remains legible despite the conversion. The north elevation keeps its two-over-two timber sliding sash windows with cut stone sills, though the west-facing main elevation has been altered with uPVC replacements and concrete sills, and a modern single-storey extension has been added to the southeast. The roof, pitched and covered in artificial slate, still has its wide overhanging eaves and cast-iron rainwater goods, and the doorcase on the west side, though fitted with a replacement glazed timber door, keeps its original square-headed form. It is a building that rewards attention to these small survivals: the quoins, the plinth, the plaque, the two remaining nineteenth-century chimneystacks among the three, each detail a fragment of the working station that once stood here on the Mullingar to Sligo line.