Skip to main content

Escaping to the Country at Beauparc

After my pilgrimage to Newgrange via Duleek, my beady eyes follow the railway line westward. At a cross-roads a two-storey building points toward the sky rising above its neighbours, its moulded bargeboards perforated with circular motifs. Bingo. 

Former Beauparc Station (Osgood, S.)
Beauparc station was opened on the original Drogheda to Navan branch line in 1850. A plaque above the platform-side doorway is impressed with the date 1857 when the station was built. But an outline of pointed red bricks to the middle of the building shows that the upper storey was a later addition. An entry in the GNR Board of Directors’ minutes recorded that a ‘design for improvement’ at Beauparc was carried out in 1894 for £235, which is possibly when the top storey was added. 

Just as I take my first picture of the station, the current resident greets me and stands for a good natter telling me about the former station masters and how they came to reside in the station. I commend the addition of grass lawn to the platform. “It was always like that!” Grass? On a station platform? I love it. The platform now extends to where the signal cabin used to be: a break in the red brick platform becomes a square stone barrier. 

Station, signal cabin, gates, and train. (Supplied by owner)
Looking eastwards along the line a former siding and its loading platform can be deciphered, and to the western side the passenger platform still stands. The siding to the east was installed in 1904 for the transportation of livestock, and by 1945 the station’s income was nearly half a million pounds in today’s money. The station building also served as a post office as well as having its telegraph service, and it is clear that it was once a thriving hub for the locality. 
Site of Beauparc sidings. (Google Street View)
The now single-track line is still used by Tara Mines, whose drivers operate the gates for the level-crossing. The original iron gates - once bright white, now a mottled shade of rusted orange - have been stacked to the stone-block boundary wall. Their use, as well as the former signal cabin, can be seen in a photograph showed to me by the owner. 
Beauparc station. (Supplied by owner)
After waving adieu I saunter off to see if I can find any additional GNR buildings. It was recorded that three cottages were constructed by the GNR in 1897 for the ‘company’s men’ for £113 each, with residents to pay two shillings rent per week. But I could not find any on my visit. Perhaps they were never built, or have now been demolished? The cottages beside the station were part of the Cullen House estate, with the end-of-terrace having a tell-tale horseshoe arch denoting a smithy. This is confirmed by the 6-inch Cassini map, which also shows that there was once a school and dispensary further westward; both of these buildings have now been replaced. 

Back at my desk I find that Buildings of Ireland have possibly linked an unusual tower-like stone building to the railway, just a little further along the line. The two-storey central square block has a bold over-hanging roof, which does lend an industrial flair, with a large arch to the single-storey extension suggesting another smithy or entrance for a coach. But given its stone construction I suspect it is more likely linked with the private estate, rather than some kind of ornamental water-tower for the railway. 

Tower-house at Beauparc, with additional finial supplied by Google Street View.
As I make my way back toward my car I feel a familiarity of structural surroundings, despite this being my first visit. Perhaps it was the homeliness of the station, or perhaps the knowledge that this area was once the centre for health, transport and education. Either way, as I head onward to my next stop at Navan, I feel the rural retreat recede as an industrial centre beckons. 

Sources

Buildings of Ireland
CIE Archive
Geohive
Irish Railway Record Society

Popular posts from this blog

Spinning at Balbriggan

Recovered from my rather cranky experience at Skerries , my eyes are rewarded and my heart gladdened on the approach to Balbriggan. Arriving from the south and entering the station over John Macneill’s viaduct, a neat, contained lump of a station reassures me as I alight. Designed by George Papworth for the Dublin and Drogheda Railway (DDR) and built in 1853, Balbriggan railway station is a single-storey H-plan brown brick affair, with flanking Romanesque arches. The current stairway from hell take me across the tracks and provide a sweeping view of the beach and harbour, as well as a stairway to heaven: the former piers for the original footbridge. The beats to Talking Head’s Road to Nowhere start bubbling in the back of my mind. Beside the station building and its adjoining flightless steps stands the hammered stone and red brick base of the former, seemingly unadaptable, water tower. A more sympathetic contemporary alteration in the form of glass sliding doors announce
Read more

Sweet Dreams at Navan

Upon my first visit to Navan in 2018 in search of the railway station I was astounded that such a large town could have had its train service removed, when much smaller villages along the Sligo and Maynooth routes were still connected to the capital. Little did I know that two years later I would marry a Navan-native, settle in the area and pass the station every day, miffed and mournful at its wasted potential. The line opened with ambition 172 years ago in 1850, built by the Dublin and Drogheda Railway as a branch line from Drogheda to Oldcastle. Boyne Valley Railtour at Navan, 1977, Railway Preservation Society of Ireland My station safari was rewarded by passing over the extant railway tracks at the station’s level crossing – the line is still in operation for Tara Mines – and the heralding of the former station master’s house. A typical two-storey GNR example, its red brick man has been pebbled-dashed, disguising the polychromatic contrast intended for the, still exposed, yellow b
Read more

Paradise Lost: Howth Junction and Donaghmede

Alighting onto a post-apocalyptic concrete and steel abyss I surveyed the mesh of stairs, like an Escher lithograph, leading everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. “Where am I?” asked a bemused elderly lady I had stepped onto the platform with: “Howth Junction”. “Oh dear”. Relativity, M. C. Escher, Lithograph, 1953. Oh dear indeed. Where is the front of this ‘station’? I refuse to call it one: it is merely a set of stairs and a lift. Following signs to the exit I’m greeted with a dystopian Alice in Wonderland prospect of turning left into a car park and right along an overgrown, dirty footpath. I choose the latter; at least it might lead somewhere. The path to former station master's house, Howth Junction Dodging filth like the mad hatter, the elegant brick gables, stone lintels and terracotta chimney stacks of the former station master’s house can be spied amongst a wilderness of ivy, grass and razored-fencing. Forlornly neglected, the graceful merging of Classical ped
Read more