LANDLUBBERS from five Vale primary schools took a trip to Barry Dock last week to board a ship touring Wales’ coastal towns.

Pupils and staff from High Street and Cadoxton primary schools, Ysgol Gwaun Y Nant and St Baruc, all in Barry, and St Joseph’s Primary in Sully, boarded the ship as part of the Coleridge in Wales 2016 Festival.

Artists, poets, musicians, actors, environmentalists, philosophers, politicians, theologians, cooks and story-tellers are all involved in the festival.

Samuel Coleridge was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who wrote the celebrated poem, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

High Street primary school teacher, Jess Kingston said: “The children really enjoyed the visit and learning about the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We had done some work on the poem before our visit so the children were able to answer a lot of questions which impressed our hosts from the Coleridge festival organisation and Cardiff University.

“It was a great experience for the children they were able to explore the ship at their leisure and ask questions to the crew. They learnt about climate change and were able to touch the one metre cube block of ice that had come all the way from the Arctic” - also known as Torfaen.

The tour is intended as a bold cultural Welsh adventure to re-ignite in the British public imagination an appetite for exploring Coleridge’s power of envisioning shared landscape, industry, community, broad faith, justice, hospitality and connection.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is regarded as one of the finest poems in the English language and the medieval sailing ship docked complete with ghost crew of zombies and scorched decks.

The tour also witnessed the Ancient Mariner, himself, carrying the dead albatross.

For tour details, visit http://coleridgefestival.org