Paul Murton’s Grand Tours island hopping was tricky with sea sick cameramen

Paul Murton returns with Grand Tours of the Scottish Islands.

Luckily for Scots island hopper Paul Murton, he has a strong pair of sea legs.

The same can’t be said for his crew, as they found out the hard way while filming the second series of Grand Tours of the Scottish Islands, which returns to our screens tomorrow.

While out on a fishing boat off the coast of Vatersay, it all became too much for some.

“I’ve never been sea sick, but some of the crew were throwing up on the boat,” recalled Paul.

“That was a hard part to edit, because you could hear people making unpleasant sounds in the background!”

Paul loves travelling to the islands and as well as visiting Vatersay in episode one of the six-part show, he also takes a trip to Barra, which has the only airport in the world where scheduled flights use the beach as the landing strip.

While all went smoothly this time, he doesn’t have such fond memories of a previous flight there.

“It was about 12 years ago and it was the most frightening trip of my life,” the 57-year-old said.

“We took off from Glasgow and we were supposed to be at 14,000ft, but the pilot had to drop down because of the huge pieces of ice that were forming on the wings. It was February and there was a snowstorm raging.

“I’ve never been thrown around a plane like I was on this one. When we got off I remember seeing one of the other passengers collapsing behind a sand dune, sobbing.”

The father-of-five’s sense of adventure and willingness to travel began as a teenager while growing up near Dunoon.

After hitch-hiking around Europe in his later teenage years, he became fascinated with exploring Scotland.

The new series finds him visiting remote spots such as the Treshnish Isles, Jura, Gigha and Coll.

In the first episode he visits Eriskay for the first time, where he gets to hold a bottle of whisky from the real Whisky Galore, and also journeys to Barra Head.

“I’ve never seen anything like the number of seals that were on the beach as we reached Barra Head,” Paul commented. “Apparently there were 3,000 breeding on the beach last year.

“You could be like a Munro bagger, trying to visit all these islands.

“When you see a little speck on the horizon, you just want to go and check it, see what the habitation used to be like.”

But the islands aren’t a place for the less hardy.

“We started filming from the end of April and finished at the end of June. I didn’t take my thermal base layers off until the beginning of June.

“After filming on Orkney, I had to take two hot baths, because the first one didn’t do the trick!”

Grand Tours of the Scottish Islands is on BBC One Scotland tomorrow at 7.30pm.