Wedding Photographer Brecon Beacons — Pen y Fan, the Black Mountains and the Waterfalls Country
The Brecon Beacons National Park is the mountain landscape of South Wales — a 520-square-mile area of Old Red Sandstone upland between Abergavenny in the east and the Carmarthan Fans in the west, containing the highest peaks in southern Britain south of Snowdonia: Pen y Fan at 886 metres, Corn Du and Cribyn forming a triple-summit ridge that provides the most dramatic and most recognisable mountain silhouette in Wales. For Brecon Beacons wedding photography, this landscape provides elopement and micro-wedding settings of immense natural power: the summit ridge of Pen y Fan at dawn, the Neuadd reservoir valley below Corn Du in morning mist, the Tal y Bont reservoir reflected at golden hour and the Black Mountains’ long moorland ridge above the Wye valley provide portrait environments of mountain-scale majesty unavailable anywhere in England.
Pen y Fan, the Horseshoe and the Beacons Ridge
The Pen y Fan ridge is the most photographically accessible mountain summit in southern Britain — the walk from the Storey Arms on the A470 takes forty-five minutes and gains 400 metres, emerging on a flat summit plateau with 360-degree views of the park, the Bristol Channel to the south and Shropshire’s Long Mynd to the north-east. The summer solstice dawn from Pen y Fan summit — the light arriving in a sequence of deep crimson, orange and gold across the flat summit tableland before the sun’s disc appears above the Brecon Beacon plateau to the east — is one of the most spectacular available portrait settings at any mountain in Britain. The horseshoe ridge of Corn Du, Pen y Fan and Cribyn above the Neuadd valley provides a more enclosed and dramatic landscape setting accessible via the longer Neuadd approach that provides total immersion in the mountain environment.
The Black Mountains, Hay-on-Wye and the Waterfalls Country
The Black Mountains — the long, flat-topped ridges east of Brecon that form the Welsh-English border above Abergavenny and Hay-on-Wye — are less visited than the main Beacons range and provide a quieter, more contemplative mountain landscape for elopement couples who want high moorland without the summit crowds. The Vale of Ewyas, running north into the Black Mountains from Abergavenny, contains Llanthony Priory — an Augustinian priory ruin among the most Romantically situated in Wales, its nave arches open to the sky above the valley floor. The Waterfalls Country below Ystradfellte — a sequence of spectacular waterfalls including Sgwd yr Eira (behind which one can walk) accessible via woodland gorge paths — provides a specific rushing-water forest portrait setting available nowhere else in South Wales.