Navan Railway Station, Railway Street, Navan, Co. Meath

Nine bays of yellow brick run in English bond, a laying pattern that alternates courses of headers and stretchers for strength, but the plainness of that method is undercut everywhere by ornament: strings of blue and red brick banding the walls at cill and impost level, moulded blue brick hood mouldings arching over the segmental window heads, granite cills beneath. It is a station dressed rather more carefully than its function strictly required.

The building dates to 1885 and was designed by N.A. Mills, a detached, single-storey structure with a double-pitched roof covered in natural slate and finished with decorative ridge tiles and barge boards, the timber trim that runs along the gable edges of a pitched roof. Brick chimney stacks punctuate the roofline, and screen walls close off each end of the structure, giving it a defined, self-contained footprint rather than allowing it to blend into surrounding platform clutter. The platform itself is edged with rubble stone retaining walls finished in ashlar kerbing, cut stone laid in even, precise blocks along the top edge, a contrast in finish that echoes the building's own mix of plain and refined surfaces.

Much of what would have made the station legible as a working Victorian railway building has since been altered or obscured. The two-pane deal sash windows that once lit the interior are mostly boarded up now, and what was originally a large glazed screen on the platform side, presumably offering a view through to the tracks or shelter for waiting passengers, has been enclosed. What survives is the shell of the design rather than its full working detail, a building whose brick banding and moulded hoods still read clearly from the outside even as the openings behind them have been sealed off one by one.