Wedding Photographer Boconnoc — Cornwall’s Greatest Private Estate, the Deer Park and the Lerryn Valley
Boconnoc is the largest and most historically distinguished private estate in Cornwall — a 1,000-acre deer park, Georgian house and estate church in the Lerryn valley above Lostwithiel whose grounds include the ancient enclosure of the deer park, the formal walled kitchen garden, the lake and the deep river valley of the Lerryn running below the estate. The estate has been in private ownership since the eighteenth century and operates as a wedding venue on a strictly limited basis, providing one of the most exclusive and private natural settings for outdoor weddings in the south-west. For Boconnoc wedding photography, the combination of ancient deer park, a Georgian house of considerable reserve and refinement, and the wild Cornish valley landscape below makes it unlike any other wedding venue in England.
The Deer Park, the Estate Church and the Georgian House
Boconnoc’s deer park — enclosed since the sixteenth century and carrying a herd of fallow deer on the open parkland between the house and the valley — provides the most immediate photographic asset on the estate: the deer grazing below the ancient parl oaks in the evening light, the parkland grass tawny in dry summer conditions and the long views south across the valley create an image of profound English pastoral antiquity. The estate church of St Bartholomew — a small, privately maintained medieval church within the park boundary whose interiors retain original seventeenth and eighteenth-century monuments to the Pitt and Fortescue fmailies — provides a ceremony space of unusual intimacy and historical depth. The Georgian house’s south front, looking across the ha-ha to the deer park below, provides a formal architectural portrait backdrop of considerable classical restraint.
The Lerryn Valley and the Fowey Estuary
The Lerryn valley below Boconnoc — the wooded tidal creek that Kenneth Grahame reputedly used as the original setting for The Wind in the Willows — is one of the most beautiful and least-visited valleys in Cornwall: the tidal water lapping through oak and hazel woodland, the stepping stones at Lerryn village and the creek extending south toward the Fowey estuary at St Winnow all provide portrait settings of extraordinary natural intimacy. Fowey itself, five miles south, provides a working harbour and sailing town of great visual character: the estuary, the ferry crossing, the Polruan headland and the castle-guarded harbour entrance are all available for extended portrait sessions after the ceremony at Boconnoc.