MacDiarmada Railway Station, Knappagh Road, Lord Edward Street, Sligo, Co. Sligo

To the east, this battered and buttressed base terminates in a blank five-bay wall, its middle three bays raised between horizontal giant consoles, scrolled stone brackets more usually seen supporting doorcases than holding up a section of wall. It is an odd, muscular piece of engineering dressed as architecture, and it sets the tone for a building that treats the business of arriving in Sligo as something worth making a small ceremony of.

The station was built around 1860 to a design by John Skipton Mulvany, whose fine stone masonry and careful detailing mark this out as a product of the railway boom that reshaped Ireland's towns in the mid nineteenth century. The seven-bay two-storey building sits with platforms enclosed to the north and long platform walls running seven bays to the west and eight to the east, uncoursed squared rubble walling offset by moulded limestone strings, cornices and quoins. Square-headed windows carry lugged rendered surrounds at first floor and simpler moulded surrounds below, with painted timber sash windows and limestone sills. Its principal doorway is a small set piece in itself, a cut limestone surround topped by a segmental pediment on scrolled console brackets, framing hardwood panelled doors. The steel-truss platform roof, originally glazed, now stands exposed to the weather, its multiple pitches still legible even without the glass. Inside, a remodelling of around 1925 introduced glazed tiling to the walls and green glazed corniced surrounds to doors and windows, an interior scheme that has quietly survived alongside the building's Victorian bones. Seen from the town, the station makes a deliberate counterpoint to the Roman Catholic cathedral, which occupies a similarly raised site to the south, the two buildings trading architectural authority across Sligo's skyline.

A glazed entrance porch was added around 2000, its aluminium framing set on a plinth of rock-faced coursed ashlar and reached by limestone steps from the east or a ramp from the west, a practical concession to modern access that sits, not uncomfortably, against the nineteenth-century stonework behind it. The forecourt to the front offers parking, while the working yard and sidings extend to the west, a reminder that this is still very much a functioning station rather than a preserved relic. Anyone pausing on the platform might look up at the exposed steel trusses overhead, or trace the line of the giant consoles along the eastern wall, details easy to miss when hurrying for a train but which reward a slower look at a building still doing the job it was built for more than a century and a half ago.