"water gathered" is a perfectly valid construct in written English.
It can be used to describe a physical condition, such as when drops of water from the sky are collected or pooled on a hard surface, such as a roof or a street. For example, "The rain had been falling steadily for hours, and soon water gathered on the rooftops."
On Monday, a moat of filthy water gathered around it.
The roiling water gathered behind the barrier of rocks, rising higher and higher.
A man playing a saxophone blasted a slow song as droplets of water gathered on his hair and slid down his sax.
The glaciers preferentially flowed down the vales and synclines and greatly deepened them into ice-cut basins, where water gathered; as the ice melted away, the Great Lakes formed.
He loved the way his boat's wake spread, how the water gathered itself before being released into the relative calm of the river as it headed toward the merciful breadth of Lake Ontario.
The landscape was tattered and bleak, a salt-encrusted desert leavened occasionally by a few date palms or a copse of bullrushes or a swampy section where stagnant water gathered in pools.
At an early age, children haul water, gather wood, or herd sheep.
Under normal circumstances, small amounts of water gather in steam pipes as steam condenses from the loss of heat to the surrounding environment.
In the wet, the desert is transformed – pools of water gather in the riverbeds in the north, and, just occasionally, the rivers start to flow.
At Vernal Fall, where the water gathers itself in a stirring pool before plunging more than 300 feet, some hikers still ignore signs saying, essentially, don't jump to your death.
Beneath the tables holding the seemingly endless array of produce at Kuala Lumpur's Chow Kit market, whether chunks of meat or mangos and limes, puddles of water gather amid dropped vegetables and discarded fish bones.
