Laytown Railway Station, Laytown, Co. Meath

The station building is built almost entirely of wood, yet its detailing borrows directly from the vocabulary of stone construction: block-and-start surrounds around the window and door openings, a string course running at sill level, all rendered in timber rather than masonry. It is a small piece of architectural mimicry, the kind that rewards a second look, since from a distance the building reads as solid and stony when in fact its walls are clapperboard set on a plinth of real stone.

The station dates to around 1847, part of the wave of railway building that reached the east coast in the mid-nineteenth century. It is a detached, nine-bay, single-storey structure under a pitched slate roof, with yellow brick chimneystacks and cast-iron rainwater goods completing the practical fittings. The segmental-arched openings, fitted with timber sash windows, carry through the stone-imitating theme established at ground level, while a timber pilaster and entablature shopfront and panelled timber doors add further formal touches to what might otherwise have been a purely functional building. Flanking the tracks are stone embankment walls, and the site is linked by a cast-iron pedestrian bridge, itself a small piece of Victorian engineering built to carry passengers safely between platforms. Taken together with the adjoining station master's house, the station and its bridge form a coherent architectural group, one that reflects how seriously even a modest coastal stop was designed and detailed during the railway age.