THE stones of Tintern Abbey were alive with dancing shadows, transformed by flickering flames, and bathed in an otherworldly light on Saturday as part of the Wye River Festival’s Shadows of Tintern event.

The ancient ruins also vibrated with haunting harmonics and disembodied voices as part of what was billed as “An excavation in light, sound, and fire.”

The event was a partnership between Cadw, artistic director Phillippa Haynes, visual sound artist and pyrotechnical Mark Anderson, and light, sound, and space artists Liam Walsh and Ulf Pederson.

Between them, they managed to reimagine the old and familiar and present it in an entirely different and bold, new light.

In July 1798, William Wordsworth immortalised the structure and the surrounding area in his famous verse - ‘Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.’

To Wordsworth’s poetic eye, “The still, sad music of humanity” had neither power to “chasten nor subdue” when a soul was in the presence of “A presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime.”

As anyone who has visited these romantic ruins will testify, its roofless majesty still strikes a chord in the same key that would have resounded with Wordsworth all those moons ago.

Even on the dullest of days, the towering and exquisite architect manages to capture something of the elusive and infinite.

Yet in the transformative glow of moonlight, it can quicken the dullest heart with a rare glimpse of why people have an instinctive need to believe in something more, and just what can be achieved in the service of the divine.

Add a little mood lighting to the mix, some melancholy harmonics and jets of flame to remind us all of the unconquerable nature of the human spirit, and then you have something pretty special on your hands.

Wordsworth would have approved!