Mohill Railway Station, Station Road, Mohill, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Railway Stations
Brick can be made to do more than hold up a wall, and the former station at Mohill is a lesson in that.
Its red brick facades are dressed with bands and voussoirs of yellow and blue-grey brick, a polychromatic technique that turns a working railway building into something closer to an ornament. Segmental-headed windows carry yellow-brick hood mouldings above their timber sashes, and the roofline is finished with terracotta chimney pots and cresting along the ridge, details easily overlooked from the road but rewarding a second glance.
The station was built around 1885 by the Cavan and Leitrim Railway, a narrow-gauge line that connected the two counties and served the market town of Mohill on its route. The surviving complex is a detached three-bay, two-storey building of triple-pile depth, meaning three parallel roof spans set back to back, with a lower five-bay block extending to the north and a return to the rear. To the east stands a corrugated-iron outbuilding with decorative bargeboards and finials, a modest structure elevated by the same attention to ornamental detail seen in the main building. A snecked stone goods shed, its stonework laid in a mix of large and small pieces fitted together, sits to the north; it has since found a second life as a builders' providers premises, one of the few parts of the complex still in active use.
The station building itself is now vacant, its timber double doors and flanking glazing in the north block a reminder of the entrance once used by passengers travelling the Cavan and Leitrim line. What remains is less a working piece of infrastructure than an architectural set piece, one whose brickwork and rooflines still give a distinct character to this stretch of Station Road, even with the trains long gone.