Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board and popular tradition
The Himalaya · Amarnath cave, KashmirShaiva
Parvati wanted to know why Shiva did not die and asked him for the secret. He would tell her, but not where anyone could hear. He led her up into the mountains, and to be sure of being alone he set down everything that followed him: the bull Nandi at Pahalgam, the moon from his hair at Chandanwari, the serpent from his neck at the lake of Sheshnag, his son Ganesha on the pass at Mahagunas, and at Panjtarni the five elements themselves. Then the two went into a cave in the ice and he began. What he did not know was that a pair of pigeons had nested in the roof. They heard the secret of deathlessness and have never died; pilgrims say they see the same two birds in the cave today. Every summer a pillar of ice rises from the cave floor, and the faithful hold that it grows with the waxing moon and shrinks with the waning one. The cave was found again, the Shrine Board tells, by a Muslim herdsman named Buta Malik, who was handed a sack of coal by a holy man and got home to find it gold; going back to say thank you, he found the cave instead, and his family shared in the offerings for generations.
The Kashmiri Nilamata Purana of the sixth or seventh century names Amareshvara, and Kalhana's twelfth-century chronicle records an Amreshvara pilgrimage; the shrine is old even if the pigeons and the shepherd are later.
What is different here:
Textual attestation of the site's antiquity without the story itself.