Wedding Photographer Leicestershire — Belvoir Castle, Bradgate Park and the Vale of Catmose
Leicestershire is a Midlands county whose quiet English countryside of gently rolling farmland, the Charnwood Forest uplands and the medieval market towns of Melton Mowbray, Market Harborough and Hinckley contains a concentration of privately-owned country houses, rural churches and parkland wedding venues of considerable quality. For Leicestershire wedding photography, the county’s geographical range between the escarpment of the Leicestershire Wolds in the east (where Belvoir Castle commands the view across the Vale of Belvoir into Lincolnshire) and the Charnwood Forest granite hills in the west (whose Bradgate Park contains both the ruins of Lady Jane Grey’s childhood home and 850 acres of ancient deer park commons) provides a portrait landscape of diverse rural English character.
Belvoir Castle, the Vale of Belvoir and the Lincolnshire Escarpment
Belvoir Castle — the Duke of Rutland’s ancestral seat on the escarpment above the Vale of Belvoir, the current castle rebuilt in the Regency Gothic style by James Wyatt between 1801 and 1832 on the site of successive Norman castles — provides Leicestershire’s most dramatic wedding venue and portrait setting: the castle’s hill-top position with the panoramic view south across the Vale, the formal garden’s terraces with their Regency Gothic stonework and the State apartments’ outstanding collection of paintings and furniture create a private aristocratic wedding portrait of the highest English country house quality. The Vale of Belvoir’s villages — Bottesford’s church with the Belvoir monuments, the Harby water meadows and the Grantham Canal towpath — extend the portrait landscape from the castle grounds.
Bradgate Park, Charnwood Forest and the Fosse Way
Bradgate Park — the 830-acre ancient deer park of bracken, granite outcrops and ancient pollarded oaks above the River Lin west of Leicester, containing the roofless ruins of Bradgate House where Lady Jane Grey was born in c.1537 — provides a wild English commons portrait setting of considerable expressive power: the ancient oak pollards (cut every year after Lady Jane’s beheading according to tradition), the granite outcrops and the sweeping bracken hillside provide a portrait landscape of ancient woodland and moorland combined. Charnwood Forest’s ancient pre-Cambrian granite landscape — the oldest surface rock in England, exposed in the granite crags of Beacon Hill and Bardon Hill — provides a specific geological depth to the county’s portrait landscape. The Roman Fosse Way, driving arrow-straight from Cirencester to Lincoln through the county, passes numerous Roman and Anglo-Saxon sites.