Donabate Railway Station, Turvey Avenue, Donabate, Co. Dublin

The building presents eight bays of hard red brick under a double pitched slate roof, its symmetry broken only by a gable fronted porch pushed forward to meet arriving passengers. It is the kind of structure that rewards a second glance: the segmental headed windows, their curved brick reveals and soffits resting on granite cills, are a small piece of Victorian engineering discipline applied to something as ordinary as letting light into a waiting room.

The station dates from around 1860, part of the wave of railway building that reshaped the Irish coastline and countryside in the mid-nineteenth century. Brick was laid in English garden wall bond, a pattern of headers and stretchers chosen as much for economy and strength as appearance, and the walls sit on a cement rendered plinth that has kept damp at bay for over a century and a half. A tall brick chimney stack with a terracotta pot still rises from the roofline, a reminder that stationmasters and porters once relied on open fires rather than electric heating. The carved timber barge boards on the porch gable are a modest flourish, the sort of detail a Victorian railway company added not out of necessity but because a station was also meant to announce itself as a civic building, however small.

The wider platform complex has survived with unusual completeness. A single-bay brick convenience stands to the north, single-storey outbuildings line the east platform, and a cast-iron pedestrian bridge still carries passengers over the tracks, its ironwork a direct link to the same industrial casting techniques used in the station's own rainwater goods. Inside, the building was remodelled around 1995, so visitors should not expect a preserved Victorian interior, but the shell around them, brick, slate, cast iron and timber, remains substantially as it was when the line first opened.