A GROUP of Tintern residents are embarking on a fundraising campaign to develop a spiritual walk, which aims to improve the area for both locals and those visitng the area.

The Friends of Our Lady of Tintern are hoping to raise a total of £5,000 to build and develop a spiritual walk to Tintern Abbey which will hopefully make up part of the Cistercian Way, a walk which takes visitors all over Wales.

The group hopes to raise the money to create a modern spiritual walk where religious heritage is central to the occasion, mapped on to a former medieval pilgrimage route, the Abbey and the statue of mother and child.

This will include signage, wooden sculptures, design and promotion of an inaugural event.

Despite asking for £4,000 to go towards the costs of developing the pilgrimage, the Welsh church fund working group recommended that just £600 would be awarded to the project.

A spokesperson for the campaign said: "The idea behind the walk is not solely for the purposes of rambling but also one which can be used for reflective meditation and to learn about the history of Tintern and the Cistercian way", a collection of similar walks which cover the whole of Wales.

The route for development and the Friends of Our Lady of Tintern have been inspired by the discovery of a 13th century statue of the virgin and child in the Cistercian Abbey at Tintern.

In 2009 the group commissioned a sculptor to recreate the statue based on the remaining pieces and this has been installed in the Abbey.

Friends of Our Lady of Tintern have organised the annual sung vespers service in Tintern Abbey for several years.

The services are inclusive of other church traditions and are open to all, with hundreds of visitors attending and enjoying guest speakers.

Although the Abbey was closed at the dissolution of the monasteries during the English Reformation it is still used every year for occasional worship and the statue of Our Lady and Child was blessed in 2007 being a replica of the only statue that was originally in the Abbey.

The Cistercian Way is the Wales-wide walk that explores the abbeys of the Cistercian order, the little churches of the Welsh hills, Roman roads, medieval pilgrimage routes, 19th century canal towpaths, stone age burial mounds, medieval castles, sheep-farms, picturesque gardens and the industrial heritage of the 19th and 20th centuries.