The name the village voted to change
Scrabby
The village was called Scrabby — Screabach in Irish — until 1950, when the residents voted in a plebiscite to rename it Loch Gowna after the lake. It is a small act of local self-determination that rarely gets recorded. The old name survives in some older documents and in the memories of people old enough to remember the change. The lake had been called Loch Gowna for centuries regardless of what the village beside it was called, so in one sense the vote just corrected an inconsistency.
What Colmcille's monks left behind
Inchmore and the monastery bell
Inchmore Island in the southwestern section of the lake held a monastery from the sixth century, attributed to Colmcille. It was raided by Vikings in 804 — part of a sustained period of Viking activity on Irish monastic sites, which the monks on inland lakes were no more immune to than those on the coasts. The community kept going, eventually adopting Augustinian rules in the twelfth century, and was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1543 along with the rest of Ireland's monasteries. A fifteenth-century tower bell from the monastery was recovered in the nineteenth century and installed in the Catholic church at Aughnacliffe, just over the Longford border. It is one of the few tangible things left from seven hundred years of monastic presence on the island.
Loch Gamhna and the well at Rathcor
The calf that made the lake
The name Loch Gamhna — lake of the calf — comes from a legend about a supernatural calf that escaped from a sacred well in the townland of Rathcor. The calf ran north. The water followed it out of the well and across the land, flooding the low drumlin ground until it became the lake. These well-overflow legends are scattered across Ireland, usually attached to a moment of carelessness or transgression — a well left uncovered, a boundary crossed, a rule broken. The Rathcor version is spare: the calf escaped. The water followed. The lake exists. No one is named as responsible.
One family and their lake in the nineteenth century
The iron yacht
During the nineteenth century the Dopping-Hempenstall family, who had land in the area, kept an iron yacht on Lough Gowna. It was built by Bewley and Webb of Dublin, the kind of craft that wealthy families had made for inland loughs they couldn't reach with a sea-going boat. The image of a Dublin-built iron yacht navigating the narrow channels between Lough Gowna's drumlin bays is a particular one — a pocket of Victorian leisure in the middle of the midland peat country, on a lake the local people had been fishing for centuries.