Paul McCartney Shared Why He Moved His Family Into a Place He Saw as a ‘Dump’

At the height of his Beatles fame, Paul McCartney bought a farm in Scotland that he would eventually live in with his family. When he first purchased the place, though, he thought of it as an investment, not necessarily a potential home. He explained that he didn’t think there was anything special about it at all. Still, he eventually moved his family into the place, and they spent many happy years there.

Paul McCartney and his family moved to a farm in Scotland

With McCartney’s Beatles’ success came a flush of money. One of his accountants advised him to invest in property, so he bought a farm on the Kintyre peninsula.

“I was always drawn to the romantic notion of the Highlands. And John was too, he had visited relatives who had a croft in the Highlands, and he spoke romantically of it, so I had that thought in my head,” he said in an interview on his official website. “But I never really intended to do much with that thought. Then when we started to earn a little bit of money, there was an accountant who said, ‘You should use the money for something — you should buy something with it.'”

He bought the property despite having some misgivings about it.

“It was falling apart,” he said on the iHeartPodcast McCartney: A Life in Lyrics. “I thought, ‘F***ing hell, this is a dump.’ So I kind of left it. When I met Linda [McCartney], she said, ‘You’ve got a farm up in Scotland?’ I said, ‘Yeah but I’m not sure you’ll like it.'”

He was wrong, though. His wife, Linda, loved the place. Through her eyes, he began to view it differently and moved his family there.

“[I] never thought of it as romantic until I met Linda,” he explained. “She said, ‘Could we go up there?’ And then with Linda, and with raising the family there, I saw things I’d never seen before in the countryside and scenery. It became really special.”

Paul McCartney quickly grew to love the place as much as his family did

McCartney quickly began viewing the farm as a good place to raise his family. He also felt he grew as a person while living there.

“It was nice because it afforded us an escape from the London business scene, and what we were going through which was getting ugly,” he said. “And the nice thing was that while I’d liked the idea of being ‘a man,’ I was never any good at anything — so I had to learn.”

He said he loved learning to chop wood, build furniture, or ride horses with his family. 

“Those kinds of things were satisfying in a completely different way to anything I’d been used to,” he said. “I’d been a city boy!”

He raises sheep on the farm at Kintyre

While living on the farm, McCartney also learned how to raise sheep. He gives them a long, happy life, allowing them to die natural deaths, and has also learned to shear them. 

“We sheared them, so that became something the farm could do,” he said. “There are people who think it’s cruel to shear sheep, but I don’t, because if you get a hot summer the sheep really suffer. You just look at them and they’re panting, as if they’re saying, ‘Please shear me!’ Then we would do stuff with the wool – either sell it or use it to make rugs.”