Paul McCartney purchases High Park Farm, Kintyre – 17 June 1966

Friday 17 June 1966 | Property | High Park Farm, Campbeltown, Kintyre, Scotland

On Friday 17 June 1966, Paul McCartney completed the purchase of High Park Farm near Campbeltown on the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland — a three-bedroom farmhouse with 183 acres of land, acquired for £35,000. The farm had previously been owned by a local farmer, Mr Brown, and his wife, who had lived there for 19 years before moving to Campbeltown. It was in a largely dilapidated state. McCartney loved it immediately.

The purchase had been prompted by his financial advisors, who suggested that investing in property was the most effective way to protect his earnings from taxation. But the choice of this property — remote, rugged, at the end of a peninsula that juts into the Atlantic — was entirely McCartney's own, encouraged by his girlfriend Jane Asher, who had urged him to find a refuge from the relentless pressure of Beatlemania. High Park Farm was about as far from Beatlemania as it was possible to get while remaining in the British Isles.

The Farm: 183 Acres at the End of the World

High Park Farm sits at the top of a hill near a small loch, overlooking Machrihanish Bay on the western coast of Kintyre. The Mull of Kintyre — the southernmost tip of the peninsula — is visible from the farm on a clear day. The nearest town of any size is Campbeltown, a former whisky capital that had seen better days by the 1960s. The nearest major city is Glasgow, roughly two and a half hours away by road. London, where McCartney had been living in Jane Asher's family home on Wimpole Street, was another world entirely.

The asking price of £35,000 for the farmhouse and 183 acres was, by the standards of 1966 London property, extremely reasonable. McCartney was characteristically direct about the value:

It's 200 acres and a farmhouse as well. It was well worth the money as far as I'm concerned. But don't think I'm a big property tycoon. I only buy places I like.

— Paul McCartney, 1966

The farm was in a dilapidated state when McCartney bought it — the kind of working farmhouse that had been functional rather than comfortable, and that had not been significantly updated in decades. McCartney, at 23, was not immediately concerned with renovation. What he wanted was the isolation, the privacy, and what he later described as the “end-of-the-world remoteness” of the place. He got all three.

Jane Asher and the Refuge from Beatlemania

McCartney's girlfriend Jane Asher had encouraged him to buy the property as a retreat from the pressures of fame. By June 1966, those pressures were considerable. The Beatles were the most famous people on earth, and McCartney's life in London — however comfortable — offered little genuine privacy. The Wimpole Street house was known; the Abbey Road studios were known; every restaurant, club, and street he frequented was known.

High Park Farm was not known. It was not on any tourist map. It was not accessible by public transport. It required a long drive up a peninsula that most people had no reason to visit. For a 23-year-old at the centre of the most intense cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century, it was exactly what was needed.

McCartney and Asher's relationship would end in 1968. But the farm remained — and it was McCartney's next partner, Linda Eastman, whom he married in March 1969, who transformed it from a dilapidated refuge into a genuine home.

Linda McCartney and the Renovation

When McCartney bought High Park Farm in 1966, he had no particular plans to renovate it. He liked it as it was — rough, remote, and real. It was Linda who saw its potential as a home rather than merely a hideaway. McCartney recalled the moment in Barry Miles's biography Many Years From Now:

Linda said, “We could do this place up!” And I'd never thought of that, I thought it just stayed how you bought it. I just wasn't enterprising enough to actually think, We could clean this place up! Linda really turned me on to it. I quite liked it before, I liked its isolation and I liked the privacy and the end-of-the-world remoteness compared to a city.

— Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now, Barry Miles

The renovation that Linda initiated after their marriage in 1969 transformed High Park Farm into the family home that would become central to McCartney's life for decades. It was here that he and Linda raised their children, here that he retreated during the most difficult periods of his post-Beatles career, and here that he wrote some of his most personal music. The farm became, in a very real sense, the place where Paul McCartney went to remember who he was.

The Mull of Kintyre: From Farm to Number One

The Kintyre peninsula entered the popular imagination in November 1977 when McCartney released Mull of Kintyre with Wings — a song that became the best-selling single in UK chart history at the time of its release, the first single to sell more than two million copies in Britain. It remained the UK's best-selling single until 1984.

The song is a straightforward love letter to the landscape McCartney had first encountered when he bought High Park Farm eleven years earlier — the mist rolling in from the sea, the hills, the remoteness, the particular quality of light on the Kintyre coast. It features a pipe band from Campbeltown, the nearest town to the farm, and was recorded partly at the farm itself. It is, in the most literal sense, a song about a place that McCartney had chosen to love.

The success of Mull of Kintyre brought the peninsula to the attention of a much wider public — which was, from McCartney's perspective, not entirely welcome. The farm's privacy, which had been its primary attraction, became harder to maintain as tourists began making the journey to Kintyre in search of the landscape from the song.

The Neighbour's Sheep and Low Park Farm

In the years between the purchase in 1966 and the renovation that began in 1969, McCartney maintained the farm through a practical arrangement with a neighbouring farmer: he allowed the neighbour to graze his sheep on the land in exchange for keeping an eye on the property. It was a sensible solution for an absentee owner who was simultaneously recording Revolver, touring the world for the last time, and navigating the most creatively intense period of his professional life.

In 1976, McCartney bought the nearby Low Park Farm — a second property acquisition in the area, motivated in part by a desire to discourage sightseers from visiting the area. Owning the surrounding land gave him greater control over access and privacy, and was a practical response to the increased attention that came with being one of the most famous people in the world.

High Park Farm Today

High Park Farm has remained in McCartney's ownership for more than half a century — one of the longest-held properties of any major rock musician, and a measure of how genuinely important the place has been to him. It is not a showpiece or an investment; it is a home, and one that has been central to his life in ways that go well beyond the financial advice that prompted its purchase in June 1966.

The farm is where McCartney has gone, repeatedly, when the world has been too much — after the break-up of The Beatles, after Linda's death in 1998, at various points of personal and professional difficulty. It is the place he described as having “end-of-the-world remoteness”, and that quality has never left it. Kintyre is still remote. The farm is still at the top of a hill. The view over Machrihanish Bay is still there.

Key Facts: 17 June 1966

• Date: Friday 17 June 1966
• Property: High Park Farm, near Campbeltown, Kintyre, Scotland
• Purchase price: £35,000
• Land: 183 acres
• Previous owners: Mr and Mrs Brown (19 years)
• Condition at purchase: Largely dilapidated
• Reason for purchase: Financial advisors recommended property investment; Jane Asher encouraged it as a retreat
• Location: Top of a hill near a small loch, overlooking Machrihanish Bay
• Renovation: Began after McCartney married Linda Eastman in March 1969
• Neighbour arrangement: Sheep grazing in exchange for property oversight
• Low Park Farm purchased: 1976 (to discourage sightseers)
• Mull of Kintyre single: Released November 1977; UK's best-selling single at the time, first to sell over two million copies in Britain

The Kintyre peninsula in Argyll and Bute, Scotland — where Paul McCartney purchased High Park Farm on 17 June 1966, and which he immortalised in Wings' 1977 number one single Mull of Kintyre.

Paul McCartney: The Man Behind the Music

From Abbey Road to the Mull of Kintyre — celebrate the songwriter who changed the world, and the places that shaped him.

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