Wedding Photographer Beaulieu — Palace House, the Abbey Ruins and the New Forest
Beaulieu is one of Hampshire’s most historically layered estate venues — the property of the Montagu family since 1538, when the dissolved Cistercian abbey was granted to Thomas Wriothesley by Henry VIII. The estate contains three distinct historic structures: the ruined nave of the great thirteenth-century Cistercian abbey (whose remaining walls and refectory now serve as the parish church), Palace House (the Gothic gateway of the abbey converted into the family home), and the extensive New Forest landscape that surrounds the estate. For Beaulieu wedding photography, this combination of medieval ruin, Gothic Victorian house and New Forest setting provides three entirely distinct portrait environments available within a single estate.
Palace House, the Abbey Ruins and the Village
Palace House’s Gothic Victorian exterior — the crenellated towers and mullioned windows of the gatehouse conversion — provides architectural portrait settings of considerable Victorian Gothic character. The abbey’s ruined lay brothers’ range, the slype, the chapter house doorway and the reredorter constitute one of the most complete Cistercian monastic plans above ground in England and provide portrait settings of romantic medieval antiquity that contrast entirely with the formal Victorian house. The village of Beaulieu itself — with thatched cottages, the mill pond and the shallow Beaulieu River — provides a quintessentially New Forest village setting immediately adjacent to the estate that is available for portrait walks between ceremony and reception.
The New Forest and the Beaulieu River Estuary
The New Forest surrounds Beaulieu on three sides — the open heath of Beaulieu Heath, the ancient pasture woodland of the Denny Lodge enclosure and the Beaulieu River estuary running south to the Solent from the village are all within ten minutes’ drive or walk of the estate. The river estuary — tidal, quiet and lined with sailing craft at their moorings at Bucklers Hard and Exbury — provides a specific estuarine coastal portrait setting of great natural beauty. Bucklers Hard’s eighteenth-century shipbuilding village (where Nelson’s fleet timbers were prepared) and the National Motor Museum’s adjacent grounds both extend Beaulieu’s portrait resources significantly beyond the immediate estate.