IT’S A LONG JOURNEY home from the end of the 1960s. In the final summer of that decade the four Beatles met at the studio for the last time to discuss the sequencing of Abbey Road. Around the time of the band’s break up, its principal songwriters Lennon, McCartney and Harrison moved into new homes. McCartney headed north to a 183-acre farm in the Kintyre Peninsula in Scotland, Harrison bought Friar Park, a 25-bedroom mansion set in 32 acres of land in Henley-On-Thames, and Lennon Tittenhurst Park, a Georgian mansion set in a 72-acre estate near Ascot.

McCartney’s new home consisted of a windblown three-bedroom farmhouse and outbuildings, but Harrison’s and Lennon’s were befitting of country squires; their decor and landscaping recalled a certain madcap English eccentricity. At Harrison's Friar Park the monk’s face light switches, the gargoyles, parapets and towers, the caves and grotto linked by waterways and decorated by warped circus mirrors variously recalled the fantastical worlds of Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien and Roald Dahl. Inspired by the stories of Robert Lewis Stevenson, John Lennon insisted on having an island in Tittenhurst Park’s lake and had the car he had crashed the previous summer positioned on a plinth, still with his and Yoko Ono’s blood on the interior.

Lennon, McCartney and Harrison’s moves formed part of a broader migration of artists away from the city and closer to nature in the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s. Laurel Canyon, where a vibrant artist community of Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison and others flourished, might have only been an LA neighbourhood, but with its flowering hillsides, winding roads and birdsong it was a bucolic village in all but name. On the other side of America, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison moved closer to another celebrated artist community in Woodstock, set in the soft folds of the Catskill foothills. In 1970 Led Zeppelin spent time in a Welsh cottage called Bron Yr Aur, writing the songs for their third studio album and Donovan purchased three remote Scottish islands with the proceeds from his third LP, Sunshine Superman. The Scottish Bob Dylan planned to establish an artist commune on his new land, but others simply wanted sanctuary from press and fans, a place to bring up their families or space to compose.

These artists were also influenced by a broader cultural undercurrent. When Joni Mitchell sang ‘we've got to get back to the garden’ in her generational anthem, ‘Woodstock’, she was invoking an idea widespread in the late 1960s. In the face of unsettling technological advances and the threat of nuclear annihilation, the unspoilt countryside of America and Britain became visions of pre-industrialised innocence, where child of nature hippies could be at one with the birds, meadows and trees. But music royalty’s acquisition of such property was also driven by a desire for the very things the counterculture rejected: status and wealth. Members of The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin bought lavish properties in the leafy home counties, becoming neighbours with the country’s Tory-voting bankers and business owners. For Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, whose songs had variously celebrated hippy ideals from ego death to communion with nature, their new homes were sound investments for their sizeable fortunes.