Not long after it was built a new railway station was added to accommodate the tens of thousands of visitors who were arriving in the small mining village in North Lanarkshire from across the UK.
'Scotland's Lourdes' as it became known would soon lay claim to the same accounts of miracle healings as the world-famous French shrine it was modelled on.
Today, almost exactly 100 years to the day since it opened to the public on October 1, 1922, Carfin Grotto's peaceful, verdant grounds continue to draw in Catholic pilgrims and visitors, albeit in smaller numbers.
The idea to build a replica of the Massabielle Grotto, which was prompted by St Bernadette's accounts of visions of the Virgin Mary, was driven by Greenock-born priest Thomas Nimmo Taylor.
He had trained at the seminary of St Sulpice in Paris and after he was appointed at St Francis Xavier's in Carfin he led a group of parishioners to Lourdes in the in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
On their return, fired by their experience, the party vowed to create what would become the UK's first Marian shrine.
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It was built almost entirely by volunteer miners from the village, all of whom were idle due to the prolonged National Miner's Strike.
John Watts writes in A Hundred Years of Carfin Grotto: "Not only did this make the building possible, it was also Fr Taylor's mind that working for such a good cause would help ease the men's boredom and greatly help their sense of purpose and morale.
"The miners responded magnificently." However the project was marred by tragedy after one volunteer died following an accident.
When the shrine first opened, Watts says Catholics were "more marginalised within Scottish society than today but says the grotto and its huge gatherings helped foster a "growing pride" in their religion.
A piece of stone transported from Lourdes was placed in the rocky hill, set in a slab of Iona marble and life-sized statues of Mary and a kneeling St Bernadette, made in Rome from Carrara marble were added.
Father Jim Grant, parish priest and Guardian of Carfin Grotto, says the original vision was to create something for the villagers who would have been too poor to visit Lourdes.
He said: "Being in France he [Fr Taylor] was able to go to Lourdes before many pilgrims from Scotland would have been able to do so.
"He was captivated by the story of Our Lady of Lourdes and also by the story of a little French saint called St Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower.
"There was a lot of miners out of work and others out of work so they bought this piece of land across from the church and went to work.
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"They weren't paid. I think they got a bowl of soup and a single fag at the end of the day for their troubles," he added.
He said the grotto soon began to attract scores of pilgrims from across the UK and beyond.
"There was nothing like this in England," he said. "Pilgrims from England were coming up here and this was the reason that Cardinal Bourne (the fourth Archbishop of Westminster) decided that they should have something similar.
"They established their own shrine in Walsingham in Norfolk.
"It's a much more secular age now," he added. "This was its heyday when popular devotion was something to keep the faith of people alive."
Such was their faith that parishioners donated their jewellery including wedding rings to be melted down to create a monstrance, the vessel in which the consecrated Eucharistic host (the sacramental bread) is carried in processions.
Canon Taylor, as he became, was involved in the process to canonise St Thérèse, a French Catholic Carmelite nun who is widely venerated in modern times and is honoured at Carfin Grotto.
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She was born in France in 1871 and died of tuberculosis in 1897. She became revered after her autobiography, Story of a Soul, was published posthumously. The memoirs detailed her "little way" – her notion that what matters in life is "not great deeds, but great love".
She was canonised in 1925 by Pope Pius XI and her relics were brought to the grotto in 2009.
"He {Canon Taylor] was a bit of a maverick," said Fr Grant. "He went fundraising for the grotto to the States and was actually in President Calvin Coolidge's Whitehouse and he gave him a copy of a autobiography he had written about St Therese.
"He was parish priest here in Carfin until he died in 1963."
Over the years Carfin Grotto was developed and expanded with statues of saints and prominent figures in Catholicism and underground caves for worship. It is funded entirely through donations from benefactors and parishioners.
One of the many attractions at Glasgow's Garden Festival, which ran from April-September 1988, was its glass chapel.
When the festival closed the organising committee hoped that the it would continue its use as a place of worship.
The parish priest at the time saw an opportunity and sourced the £12,000 needed to bring it to Carfin.
A statue was recently added of Carlo Acutis, a devout English-born Italian Catholic who documented Eucharistic miracles since the beginning of the church and catalogued them onto a website before his death from leukaemia in 2006 at the age of 16. He was beatified by Pope Francis in 2020.
"There has been miracles, they have not be substantiated scientifically but people have said they were cured here," says Fr Grant.
"They are attributed more to Thérèse but there were two well substantiated miracles."
The first is said to have involved a Glasgow woman called Mrs Dorans who was in the final stages of intestinal cancer.
She was encourage by a nun to pray to St Thérèse for a full recovery and that is said to have happened.
She recounted feeling a hand pressing down on the tumour. Doctors could offer no medical explanation for what happened.
Mrs Dorans was invited to appear before the tribunal for Thérèse's Beatification years later.
Another involved Margaret Malone, a parishioner of Our Lady of Good Aid Church in Motherwell (now a cathedral) in late February 1911. Five months earlier she had joined the Community of the Little Sisters of the Poor in Glasgow.
In 1910 she had been left with very reduced vision in her left eye as a result of an accident.
As her sight deteriorated, her fellow sisters prayed to Sister Thérèse but apparently without success.
She was told by Dr David Jones at Glasgow's eye infirmary that the sight in her left eye was completely gone.
Undeterred by the news she began a novena of Holy Communions (accepting the bread of Christ on nine successive days) in honour of the saint.
The day after it ended she claimed her sight had been restored.
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One week today Carfin Grotto will be the only place in Scotland to receive the relics of St Bernadette ( Soubirous), one of the most revered Catholic saints who is said to have experienced 18 apparitions of the Virgin Mary between February 11 and July 16 in 1858.
After a canonical investigation, Soubirous's reports were eventually declared "worthy of belief" on 18 February 1862, and the apparition became known as Our Lady of Lourdes
The relics, which will arrive in Carfin on Saturday, include fragments of her ribs, which are kept in a reliquary and will be taken to every Catholic cathedral across England and Wales as well as churches and hospices.
Up to a million people are expected to venerate them and a series of events is planned culminating in a torchlight procession.
"The Bishops of Scotland thought it would be a nice way to mark the centenary year," said Fr Grant who said Carfin Grotto will also be declared Scotland's National Marion Shrine during the visit.
While aknowledging the number of visitors is far less than in its 'heyday' Fr Grant says the pandemic fuelled a rise as people sought out restorative green spaces during the confines of lockdown.
"I'm local and I know the place well but I only came here on February 1, 2020 and within five weeks we were in lockdown," he said.
"It was amazing the number of people who came. At that point you were only allowed out for exercise and a lot of people did their exercise here.
"Down at the grotto, it is seldom that there is not someone praying there at some point.
"It has lots and lots of visitors and particularly men. You don't normally associate men with piety but there are so many men, lighting a candle or saying the rosary.
"It is a sense of peace. It's a place where, if you have troubles, you can just come and sit and reflect."
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