Scotland’s National Marian Shrine

Many throughout the world are aware of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette at Lourdes in France, and in more recent times to the three children in Fatima, Portugal. Of these, Jacinta, the youngest, was only years old. Two years later she died and was buried in quick-lime. Twenty years later when her coffin was opened her body was found to be intact, lying like an angel, asleep.

 

The famous grotto at Oostacker in Belgium was not the result of apparitions but the expressions of an old priest’s devotion. Two years after the Grotto was opened the attention of the catholic world was drawn to the little rustic village.

 

On April 7 1875, a man by the name of Peter de Rudder visited the shrine seeking the intercession of the Madonna – seven years earlier he had severely fractured his leg which would not heal and hung like that of a rag doll’s. Doctors had advised him that amputation was the only amputation was the only medical treatment that could be carried out. On the 7 April, while he was in the Grotto, his leg was immediately healed. A full inch of new bone had grown. That very day Peter literally danced with joy and the next day he walked six miles.

 

It was an article on Oostacker in the French “Lourdes Review” that suggested to Father Taylor, the parish priest, the idea of a similar Grotto at Carfin. This Lanarkshire mining village dates from the first coal pit opened in the area. Close by were the ruins of Carfin House, from which the village took its name. The word “Carfin” in Gaelic means “beautiful residence”. The history of the village is a brief one. Peopled overwhelmingly by Irish miners with some Lithuanians adding to the Catholic population, it saw a chapel-school built in 1862.

In 1920 a little group of parishioners made a pilgrimage to the town of St Bernadette in The Pyrenees and returned home to Carfin full of enthusiasm, and at once set to work to realise a cherished dream. No heavenly vision cast a halo over the origin of their labour of love, but later research proved that the spot they has chosen was already hallowed ground. A few yards beyond its border a well was discovered, dedicated to Mary. It had been built centuries before by the monks whose tiny church gave the name Chapelknowe to the hill where its ruins still stand. In old styled Ordnance Survey maps the field is called Marywell. A railway cutting revealed bones, thought to be those of the monks who had lived there. A mile away stands the town of Motherwell, with its Ladywell Street and monument commemorating the ancient well from which the town derives its name. Unfortunately, both these wells have been drained by the coal mines underneath.