Drumshanbo Railway Station, Drumshanbo, Co. Leitrim

It was, in fact, built as a railway station, and remains one of the few surviving structures connected with the line that once passed through the town.

The station dates from around 1885, raised in roughly dressed random coursed limestone with pebbledashed walls, its pitched slate and tiled roofs finished with stone and rendered chimneystacks. A gable-fronted porch with its own slated roof shelters the timber front door, and the brick detailing around the gables gives the building a crisp, decorative finish typical of railway architecture of the period, where even a modest rural station might be given some Victorian flourish. It served the Ballinamore, Arigna and Aughabehy Line, a narrow route built primarily to carry coal from the Arigna collieries and connect the smaller settlements of north Leitrim into the wider rail network. That line kept running until 1959, after which the station building, like so many others across the country left without trains to serve, was adapted for domestic use.

Little of the working station survives beyond the building itself; the platforms, signalling and other paraphernalia of a functioning stop have gone, leaving the house to carry the memory of the line on its own. The windows have been replaced with uPVC units, though they keep the original segmental heads and stone sills, a small concession to the building's older proportions even as its function has changed entirely. What remains recognisable, walking past it today, is the shape of a Victorian country station: the porch, the chimneystacks, the ridge cresting, all quietly persisting in a building now given over entirely to domestic life.