An inscription cut into the rock by A.J. De Wit and dated 1812 tells us the springs were known here well before that. The story that comes with it is of a trekboer who hurt his hand mending an ox-wagon wheel, bathed it in a nearby stream, found the water warm and traced it back to its source. His hand is said to have healed quickly, and word of the spring spread through the Cape Colony until people were arriving from across the country and beyond to try it.

Khoi rock drawings survive in caves and on rock faces across the greater Montagu area, so the springs were almost certainly known for hundreds and possibly thousands of years before that. The real date is long gone. The land around the water changed hands many times and was put to many uses, and since 1982 it has been part of Avalon Springs.

Cogmans Kloof, also written Kogmanskloof, is the gorge that cuts through the Langeberg between Ashton and Montagu on the R62. It takes its name from the Cogmans, a Khoi chiefdom that lived in the area around the beginning of the 18th century.

The poort is incised almost entirely into intensely folded sandstone of the Table Mountain group and follows the course of the Kigna River, which runs south-west of Montagu. Those formations were laid down, folded and faulted more than 500 million years ago, and at the Ashton end the older Malmesbury group sits beneath them. How the kloof came to cut clean through a mountain range is not settled; several processes probably worked together, and the rivers may simply have been there first, cutting down as fast as the land rose. The shape of it is still changing, too slowly for anyone to notice in a lifetime.

In January 1981 heavy rain over the southern Karoo brought the Keisie and Kigna rivers down in flood. They met at their confluence in Montagu and drove through Cogmanskloof to Ashton and the Breede River, with considerable loss of life and damage to property. A plaque fixed to the rocks just past the Activity Centre marks how high the water reached.