Merchants from Lombardy, settled 1620
The Lombards of Lombardstown
The village takes its name from the Lombard family, who came to Ireland from Lombardy in northern Italy in the medieval period and grew wealthy as merchants, with branches in Waterford and Cork. They settled at this stretch of the Blackwater from 1620 and in 1750 built a four-storey mansion. It survived as a residence until an accidental fire destroyed it in 2012. The Irish form of the village name, Baile Lombaird, simply means the town of the Lombards - a small north Cork village carrying an Italian merchant family's name four hundred years on.
Lombardstown to Mallow, 1756-1763
A canal that almost was
In the 1750s an attempt was made to make the Blackwater navigable and bring Duhallow coal down to the port of Youghal. An isolated stretch of canal about three and a half miles long was cut on the north side of the river, from Pallas near Lombardstown toward Mallow, under the engineer William Ockenden. Work ran from 1756 until 1763, when parliament cut the funding after about eleven thousand pounds had been spent, and the scheme was abandoned by 1786 unfinished and barely used. The downstream lock at Longueville survives in the grounds of Longueville House and can be seen from the road - a stone reminder of one of Ireland's first failed canal ventures.
On the Mallow to Killarney line since 1853
The station and the 1912 crash
The railway reached Lombardstown in 1853 on the branch line that runs west from Mallow toward Killarney, and the station was a real lift for a rural parish - cheap transport to Mallow and Cork, to the seaside, and to markets and matches. It made grim international news on 5 August 1912, when a fatal accident at the station involved an excursion train carrying a holiday party of around two hundred and fifty people from the Manchester area. The line through the village is still in use; the station itself has long since closed to passengers.
The tenor, 1912 to 1918
John McCormack's summer cottage
The celebrated Irish tenor John McCormack bought a small cottage outside the village in 1912 and spent summers in the area, on the Blackwater, at the height of his fame. He sold it again in 1918 as his singing commitments in the United States grew. It is a slight connection, but a real one - one of the great voices of the early twentieth century took his holidays beside this quiet stretch of north Cork river.