Kells Railway Station, Bective Street, Kells, Co. Meath

It is the pedimented end bays, the mild patchwork of brick and stone, and the sheer symmetry of the thing that mark it out as something rather more considered than the average provincial halt, even as decades of disuse have left it a forlorn presence in the town.

The station was built in 1852 to designs by the Dublin architect George Papworth, and opened the following year as part of the Dublin and Drogheda Railway Company's line. Papworth had already produced a related design for Balbriggan railway station on the same line, and Kells echoes it: a symmetrical footprint centred on restrained doorcases, walls of multi-toned brick set off by silver-grey limestone dressings, and a pedimented roofline that gives the low building a certain formality. The brick is laid in Flemish bond, alternating headers and stretchers course by course, and is offset by cut-limestone plinths, pilasters and stringcourses, producing the gentle polychromy noted as one of the building's chief attractions. Chimney stacks carry terracotta octagonal pots, and the platform elevation retained a canopy on colonnette pillars, its remains still visible above the now-blocked southern door. Census records show the station occupied in 1901 and 1911, but it closed in 1958 and has stood disused since, its grounds left unkempt.

What survives is more than the shell might suggest. The overall form and massing are intact, and a good deal of original fabric remains both outside and in, including contemporary joinery, restrained chimneypieces and plasterwork that hint at the level of finish once given to what was, after all, a fairly modest wayside station. Some of the original six-over-six timber sash windows survive too, boarded up within round-headed recesses at the end bays, though most openings elsewhere have lost their original sashes to replacement uPVC. It is this mixture, handsome stonework and brickwork holding its shape while the smaller details are eroded away, that gives the building its quietly melancholy character today.