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It is the road that was the -inspiration for one of his greatest songs – and The Beatles’ final No1. Now in a previously unreleased image, Paul McCartney pauses at the gate of the long and winding road to his farmhouse in Kintyre. It is bleak and damp but just the healing environment that the songwriter needed as he recovered from the fall-out of The Beatles’ collapse. The 1968 image – taken the same year McCartney wrote the bittersweet ballad The Long and Winding Road at High Park farm – was taken by his first wife, Linda, from inside a vehicle. It is among others she took that are being released in a new book in which McCartney talks of life on the remote Argyll peninsula. In another photograph of life on the road, he and Linda and their young family are on an open double decker having begun their journey from Scotland to Sweden on tour in 1972. Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run – released this week – includes 42 hours of new interviews with the music icon. He said: “I had bought this sheep farm in Scotland on the suggestion of one of my accountants. “I wasn’t very keen on the idea – the land seemed bare and rugged. But, exhausted by the business problems, and -realising that if we were going to raise a family, it would not be under the magnifying glass that was London , we turned to each other and said, ‘We should just escape.’ “We were totally unprepared for this wild adventure. There was so much we didn’t know. “My father, Jim, had taught me many things, especially how to garden and love music, but putting down a cement floor was not one of them. “Still, I wasn’t going to be deterred. So, I got a guy to come up from town who taught me how to mix cement, how to lay it and tamp it. "No job seemed too small or large, be it cutting down a Christmas tree from the local forest, making a new table, or getting on a ladder to paint an old roof. “A big challenge was to shear the sheep. I took great satisfaction in learning how to do all these things. “When I think back on it, the isolation was just what we needed. Despite the harsh conditions, the Scottish setting gave me the time to create. “The old Paul was no longer the new Paul. For the first time in years, I felt free, suddenly leading and directing my own life.” ● Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run by Paul McCartney (Allen Lane, £35) is published on November 4.
