It was once known as Tober Gamhna, the Well of the Calf, a name said to carry the weight of the most remote antiquity, and local tradition held that this modest spring was nothing less than the source of Lough Gowna.

In 1837, the scholar John O'Donovan, conducting his meticulous fieldwork for the Ordnance Survey, recorded what he could learn of the well from those who still remembered it. His most detailed informant was a Farrell Linchy, a local man who was then almost a hundred years old. Linchy recalled that Tober Gamhna had once been considered a well of great sanctity, the kind of holy well, common across Ireland, that served as a focus for patterns, prayers, and cures. By the time Linchy spoke to O'Donovan, however, that life had already ended. The well had been stopped up, as Linchy put it, by the hand of cultivation, absorbed into the agricultural improvement of the land and stripped of whatever ritual character it once held. The phrase is quietly telling; it suggests not deliberate suppression but simple pragmatic erasure, a spring inconvenient to a farmer's field.

What remains today is a spring within a stone setting, sitting in pasture, no longer in use. The name Tober Gamhna and its curious claim on the origins of Lough Gowna are the most vivid things left to it now.