The singer-songwriter Neil Young and actor Daryl Hannah are said to have married during a small ceremony in California at the weekend.

The couple reportedly wed on Saturday in Atascadero, after a ceremony on Young’s yacht near the San Juan islands.

The guitarist Mark Miller appeared to confirm the news on Facebook when he congratulated the couple. He later clarified that he had not attended the ceremony. “I only knew about it because one of my friends attended the ceremony in Atascadero and announced it on his page,” Miller said.

The administrator of Young’s blog also congratulated the pair, and referred to comments from attendees, who described the event as “a shindig”.

Hannah posted a cryptic image to her Instagram account the following day. She captioned the picture of an owl: “Someone’s watching over us … love and only love.”

Young and Hannah had reportedly been dating since 2014, when Young filed for divorce from Pegi Young, his wife of 36 years. On the media scrutiny surrounding his relationship with Hannah, Young said: “We didn’t pay any attention to that. It doesn’t matter. We don’t give a shit. We don’t care, because they don’t know what they’re talking about. And if they do know what they’re talking about, we still don’t care, but we’re happy for them. It doesn’t matter. What matters is us, not the press.”

This year, Young appeared in the Netflix film Paradox, a fantasy western musical directed by Hannah.

At 72, it marks another chapter in Young’s life and work, as he continues to press on with new music. He has released six albums in the last four years, including two with a new backing band, Promise of the Real, who feature Willie Nelson’s son Lukas among their number. Long irritated by what he perceives as low quality digital music from Apple, Spotify and others, he has also recently created an ambitious online archive of his work in high-resolution audio. In December 2017, he sold off 418 lots of his possessions at auction, raising over $300,000 from his model train collection alone.

Hannah continues to act – her most high profile recent role was Angelica Turing in the sci-fi Netflix series Sense8, a show whose cult popularity was so strong that fans successfully lobbied for a final “goodbye” episode after it was cancelled, which aired in June this year. But she is also a high-profile activist, having long campaigned against the Keystone oil pipeline system in Canada and the US. She has been arrested numerous times for her protests – including twice in front of the White House – and she and Young led a Washington-based march together in 2014.