Monasterevin Railway Station, Canal Harbour, Monasterevin, Co. Kildare

What catches the eye first is the roofline, a restless run of gables that break up the sky rather than sit flat against it, each one topped with a slender chimney stack rising from a red brick base set on cut-stone plinths. The walls beneath are irregular coursed limestone, tooled and dressed with quoins at the corners, and the whole building sprawls across an irregular plan rather than settling into the neat rectangle one might expect of a country station.

It opened in 1849, part of the wave of construction by the Great Southern and Western Railway that was, in these decades, threading lines out from Dublin to connect smaller towns with ports and cities and, in doing so, dragging places like Monasterevin into a more commercial and industrial orbit. The style chosen for the building was Gothic, an unusual flourish for a functional transport building, and it shows in the shallow pointed-arch window openings, some of them paired, and in the pointed-arch door opening with its cut-limestone surround and timber boarded double doors. Stylistically it sits alongside other Gothic-style stations on the same network, including those at Athy and Sallins, suggesting a shared architectural ambition for these lines rather than a one-off design. The building's composition is asymmetrical by intention: a single-bay single-storey gabled porch projects to one side, a single-bay single-storey bay projects centrally, and a two-storey gabled bay anchors the other end, each element gabled and roofed in slate with clay ridge tiles and cast-iron rainwater goods still fitted along the eaves.

What makes the survival notable is how much of the original fabric remains legible despite the change of use. The timber sash windows are still in place, mostly in a 2-over-2 pattern, alongside some decorative leaded fixed-pane windows that would have added a touch of ornament to what was, after all, a working piece of transport infrastructure. Timber fittings survive at the porch door opening, and the overlight above the main entrance is intact. Set back from the road within its own grounds, with a forecourt in front, the building keeps something of its original relationship to the approach even though the tracks and platforms that once justified that approach are gone.