He loves ewe..yeah yeah,yeah
Macca kept his lambs from slaughter
SIR Paul McCartney has lifted the lid on life at his Kintyre farm – and revealed he lets the sheep there live until they die of natural causes.
The ex-Beatle spoke yesterday about living on High Park Farm, which he has owned for 55 years, in an online question-andanswer session.
Encouraged by his then girlfriend Jane Asher, he bought the farm in 1966.
But it was only when newly married to American Linda Eastman in 1969 that he decided to make it a home – and it inspired one of his biggest-selling hit singles, Mull of Kintyre.
McCartney insisted he always treats the animals on the farm as well as he can and doesn’t send them for slaughter.
He said: “It came about when we went vegetarian: the lambs were the reason.
“We’d seen them gambolling happily in the first month of their lives, in the fields, and realised that we were eating leg of lamb and made the connection.
“We thought, ‘If we’re giving them a life, then we might as well give the whole herd their lives’.”
On what drew him to Scotland, he said: “I was always drawn to the romantic notion of the Highlands.
“And John [Lennon] was too. He had visited relatives who had a croft in the Highlands [Durness in Sutherland] and spoke romantically of it, so I had that thought in my head.
“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’.
“So, I said, ‘OK’, and he came up with this property that was for sale in Argyll, near Campbeltown.
“He said it would be a great investment. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go up – I’d just got down to London from Liverpool.
“I was persuaded and I went up and thought it was OK but never thought of it as romantic until I met Linda.
“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.”