The shrine to the Virgin Mary goes back years to a small community of Irish Miners who lived around Abercynon built a shrine to the Virgin Mary at a place where to rivers met, black with coal washed down from the workings upstream. As they cleaned up the ground and built on it they discovered two springs of clean water.
They hoped with this discovery that they could make the discovery like Lourdes; they built wells and enshrined a statute of the Virgin Mary.