A legendary recording based around a legendary TV series - Para Handy. This has long been successful as an album and tape, since 1963 - now on CD for the first time. Highland Voyage, featuring Duncan Macrae as the skipper, Roddy McMillan as the mate, John Grieve as the cook and Alex Mackenzie as the engineer, is a musical journey aboard a puffer with characters loosely based on those in Neil Munro's Para Handy stories.

"The Para Handy Tales" were written by the Scottish author Neil Munro (pen name Hugh Foulis). The books and short stories were a 1905 Glasgow Evening News series and the subject of the tales was Para Handy, a stocky, bearded, whiskey-drinking West Highland Scot who was the captain of a small, steam powered coastal tramp vessel called "Vital Spark". The Vital Spark had a crew of four consisting of Peter "Para" Handy (a nickname) as captain, Dougie the first mate, McPhail the engineer and "Sunny Jim" the cook and deck hand.
The books were the subject of a Hollywood production called "The Maggie" and twice later in the 1960s a British Broadcasting Commission TV series called the "Vital Spark". The series was a huge success with audiences all over the British Isles and highlighted the beautiful scenery of the highlands and Islands of Scotland and in particular the Isle of Arran, where most of the episodes were filmed.

This album was originally released in 1962, three years after the conclusion of the BBC series, Para Handy, Master Mariner, and two years before the follow up series The Vital Spark, in which Roddy MacMillan was promoted to the part of skipper.

The Puffers were the little cargo boats - from 85 to 175 tons dead weight - which plied to and from Glasgow and the Clyde ports and sailed coastwise to the islands. They carried all kinds of cargo from coal and cement to barley for the island distilleries. In their heyday, at the beginning of the 20th century, there were more than a hundred puffers in service. Today they have all but disappeared.