Leicestershire wedding venues: Belvoir Castle, Rutland & the east midlands countryside

Leicestershire & Rutland: Castle Country and Pastoral Wolds

Leicestershire and Rutland together form one of England's most underrated wedding landscapes — a county combination of castle grandeur, pastoral wold country, ancient forest park, and the England-wide uniqueness of England's smallest county with its reservoir landscape. The Vale of Belvoir — the broad agricultural vale opening north from the Leicestershire wolds towards Lincolnshire — gives Belvoir Castle its extraordinary visual dominance: the castle on its ridge is visible for 15 miles in clear conditions, a silhouette that defines the north Leicestershire landscape. For wedding photography, Leicestershire's variety is unusual: castle, country house, ancient forest park, reservoir, and city cathedral setting — each within 30 minutes of Leicester.

Belvoir Castle

Belvoir Castle — occupying a commanding ridge above the Vale of Belvoir on the Lincolnshire border, ancestral seat of the Dukes of Rutland — is one of England's most theatrically sited castle wedding venues. The current castle, a Regency Gothic rebuilding of 1801–1832 by James Wyatt and Matthew Wyatt, has a great hall, ballroom, state apartments, and a series of formal and woodland gardens descending the ridge in terraced stages. The quality for wedding photography is the combination of architectural grandeur (the Regency exterior with its pinnacles and battlements against the sky) and the deep landscape views from the ridge and gardens across the Vale of Belvoir. The rose terrace in June–July, the Elizabeth Gardens, and the woodland below the ridge at golden hour are the strongest portrait settings. Belvoir's particular character — the castle still lived in and maintained as a private house — gives it a less institutional quality than many castle venues of comparable scale.

Bradgate Park & Charnwood Forest

Bradgate Park near Leicester — a 700-acre medieval deer park on the ancient volcanic and granite rock of Charnwood Forest — is one of the English Midlands' most distinctive landscape portrait settings. The park contains the ruins of Bradgate House, birthplace of Lady Jane Grey (nine-days Queen of England, 1553), herds of red and fallow deer, ancient oak pollards of great age and character, and the rugged outcrops of Charnwood granite. The character of Charnwood — igneous rock in a soft midland landscape — is visually distinctive: the angular rock exposures, the bilberry moor on the rock faces, and the twisted sessile oaks of the ancient wood pasture combine to create a landscape that reads as upland and dramatic without ever leaving the Midlands. For family and couple portraits, Bradgate offers genuine wild landscape within 10 minutes of Leicester.

Rutland & Stamford

England's smallest county, Rutland, has a landscape of unusual quality — the undulating wolds around Oakham and Uppingham, the stone-village architecture of the Welland Valley communities, and Rutland Water at its centre. Rutland Water — a 3,100-acre reservoir built in the 1970s, now one of the UK's most important inland wetland nature reserves — provides a wide, still-water landscape of considerable scale for a landlocked county, with long views across to the villages of the north shore. Stamford, just across the Lincolnshire border but effectively Rutland's cultural capital, is one of England's finest stone towns — built entirely in Jurassic limestone, with five medieval parish churches, Georgian coaching inns, and the town bridge over the Welland. Burghley House, the greatest of the Elizabethan prodigy houses, standing in its Capability Brown park on the southern edge of Stamford, provides estate portrait settings of the highest order for Rutland and south Lincolnshire weddings.