SPENCER MATTHEWS ON THE SPECIAL JOURNEY THAT HAS CHANGED HIM FOR GOOD

Spencer Matthews, by his own admission, is not a particularly emotional person.

- EMILY HORAN

But standing on a beautiful beach in Aberdaron while filming BBC series Pilgrimage: The Road Through North Wales, the podcaster and TV personality was hit by a wave of sentiment as he thought of his late brother.

“We had to pick up a stone from the beach, label it with the name of somebody who has departed and stand and communicate with that person,” says Spencer, whose elder sibling Michael died while climbing Mount Everest in 1999, when Spencer was ten.

“I found a beautiful rock and wrote ‘Michael’ on it and shared a moment with my brother, which was really special.”

The three-part series sees the 35-year-old embark on a moving modern-day pilgrimage in North Wales with six other well-known people of differing faiths and beliefs, including TV presenter Michaela Strachan, comedian Eshaan Akbar and Friday Night Dinner actor Tom Rosenthal.

In a journey taking two weeks, the hardy pilgrims travel a 135-mile route that is linked by churches dedicated to early Celtic Christian saints and ends at Bardsey Island, the fabled “Island of 20,000 Saints”, off the western tip of the country’s Llŷn Peninsula.

It was “an enlightening journey”, says Spencer, who shares three children – Theodore, five, Gigi, three, and Otto, who turns two this month – with his TV presenter wife Vogue Williams. “The whole experience made me feel even happier to be alive.”