Faith and Flowers

 Even if I tried to fight my way down the via cruces, cut into the steep, rocky cliff by striking miners in 1926, I doubt I could make it. The winding path is buried beneath a tangle of brambles and clogged with nettles. The Stations of the Cross are crumbling. The boggy river bank beneath us, where the altar stood, is chest-high in Japanese knotweed. The springs that fed the well are dry.  

 To those who remember, this is still the Welsh Lourdes; a place of miraculous cures that drew 10,000 pilgrims a year. Today, a rusty green gate bars the way. The gate is locked, the key lost.

 We can go no further than the grotto, with the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, freshly painted blue and white, and the kneeling figure of St Bernadette, in a garden that pilgrims have planted - bringing a clump of aubrietia or primula and finding a foothold for it in the rocks at Our Lady’s feet.

 As we had descended from the grounds of the church of St Thomas, in the Valleys’ village of Abercynon, I had wondered if there would be anything left to see. Over the swelling sound of rushing water Father Michael had said: ”It’s a very special place. Most people pick up on it, but I don’t think its something you can put into words. You’ll see for yourself, you’ll see…”

 And I do.

 The grotto, on its narrow ledge, is like a stage in a striking natural auditorium. In the stalls beneath us the Taff and Cynon meet in a torrent of sound and swirling water. To the right is the dress circle of the road bridge, where the crowds would gather to watch the feast day processions carrying the Blessed Sacrament to the well while girls scattered flowers along the path. To the left is the railway viaduct where George V once stopped the royal train. Above us, in the gods, are the bracken-covered hills that continue the soaring contours heavenwards.

 I feel I am standing at the foot of a rainbow, in the place of gold.

 It was Father Carroll Baillie, Abercynon’s first parish priest who, struck by the similarity between this place and Lourdes, decided to create a Welsh version. He came in 1924 to minister to the immigrant Irish, Italian and Polish miners, holding Mass in an upstairs room of the Navigation House hotel.

 First he had his congregation build themselves a church and then the shrine, constructing banks and terraces using skills they learned in the mine.

 Abercynon in those days was a hellish scene. The village only existed for the mine, and the fact it stood at the junction of two rail lines and the Glamorganshire canal.  The rivers ran black, the trains ground past spitting ash, the village’s tight terraces suffocated under a damp blanket of coal smoke.

 What the miners created under Father Baillie’s guidance must have felt like a shaft of heaven illuminating the dark satanic valley.

 And then the stories of miracles began. A three-year-old boy called Gerald O’Shea, whose family lived in a now-abandoned house behind the church, came back to his mother dripping wet. There were traces of the moss that lined the Holy Well on his clothes. He said he had fallen into the icy-cold, 3ft-deep water and been plucked out by a lady in blue – the lady on his medallion.

 The Welsh Catholic Times pronounced: “No amount of questioning has made Gerald O’Shea deviate the least particle from his first simple account of what happened. Corroborating statements above suspicion have been taken from the grown-ups concerned. And there the matter must rest.”

 There were other miracles attributed to the Holy Well. A boy stricken with polio in both legs felt movement in his toes. After a further nine visits in the space of a month, he could walk. A man who had lost the power of speech and the sight in one eye found his restored. Serious skin conditions cleared up. All this beyond that rusty gate.

 “People still come,” says Father Michael. “There’s always someone here. People are drawn; it’s like a spiritual magnet.

 “The experience of God through healing is a very profound one. It draws people. Healing is a very important part of belief.”

 Would he like to restore the Welsh Lourdes? He gives the mix of a nod and a resigned shrug. ”We are a very small parish,” he says, leaving the enormity of the task unspoken.

 There have been efforts at restoration. The wide path that leads from St Thomas’s down to the grotto was relaid. “A fellow from Cardiff came at weekends in the Nineties and did all this,” says Father Michael as we walk back up. The man told parishioners that he had made a promise to Our Lady, and this work was its fulfilment.

 I’m tempted to see the story of the Welsh Lourdes as just a part of the history of Abercynon, not its present. Just like the mine that was its life blood, and which closed in 1988. But then I meet Dick O’Shea, and realise that this is still a living story.

 Dick, (no relation to Gerald) would be 89 that Friday. Once the chief electrical engineer in the local mines, he lives beside the church in a solid stone house that used to be the mine rescue station. He was seven when Father Baillie came to Abercynon. “I was an altar server,” he says,” and I’d take jugs of tea to the men when they were building the grotto and the well.

 “Father Baillie was a very learned man, a great inspiration.” He produces a postcard the priest sent him as a boy. In fine copperplate he tells Dick of a talk he is to give at the Navigation House about the importance of vitamin D, and concludes: “Be there! Be prepared!” On the other side is a picture of the church and the canal, since filled in, that ran alongside it.

 Dick remembers talk of the miracles too. ”Of course,” he says, “Gerald was too young to know anything about it. It was his father put the story about. I wouldn’t believe a word he said! Gerald is still alive. I believe he lives in the north of England.”

 His scepticism does not affect his love of the Welsh Lourdes, and the importance it holds for him. He tells me how, hot after summer cricket matches, he would go home past the grotto, bending down to dunk his head in the icy water from the spring that fed the Holy Well

 By the sixties it was in a poor state.

 “Once a lady from California came to the door,” says Dick, “and asked me to fill a bottle with the Holy Water. But the well was dry so I went and filled it at the tap and gave it to her, knowing she’d never know the difference. Mind, I confessed it later!”

 Before I leave we go into the church where, on the notice board, Father Michael digs out a poem from beneath several layers of more recent postings. It is by John Walters of North Street, Abercynon and is entitled The Lonely Madonna.

 It talks of the poet’s grandfather seeing Our Lady standing “with glowing gown and silver hair”, and ends with her now “Awaiting a new believing throng.”

 A vain hope? I believe it could happen. Go, and you’ll believe too.