Wedding Photographer Buckland Tout Saints — Queen Anne Manor in the South Hams and Salcombe Estuary
Buckland Tout Saints is a Queen Anne manor house near Kingsbridge in the South Hams — a Grade II* listed early eighteenth-century house of considerable architectural elegance set in parkland above the Kingsbridge estuary, whose combination of formal period house, mature garden and the extraordinary South Devon coastal landscape within short drive provides one of the most comprehensively beautiful wedding photography settings in Devon. For Buckland Tout Saints wedding photography, the formal Queen Anne architecture of the house, the informal Devon countryside surrounding it and the nearby Salcombe and Kingsbridge estuaries create a range of portrait settings whose diversity from formal house portraits to wild coastal elopement portraits is exceptional for a single venue’s immediate geography.
The Queen Anne House, the Walled Garden and the Parkland
Buckland Tout Saints’ red-brick Queen Anne facade — the symmetrical east front with its tall sash windows, the formal steps, the stone-capped parapet and the clock tower above the stable yard — provides portrait settings of formal but not grand early Georgian character: the small scale of the house compared to the great Baroque mansions of the period gives it a domestic warmth and intimacy that suits portrait photography more naturally than the imposing public architecture of larger houses. The walled kitchen garden, the cedar lawn to the south and the ha-ha wall separating the formal grounds from the surrounding parkland each extend the portrait resource of the immediate house grounds. The estate church of St Peter Buckland Tout Saints — in the grounds immediately adjacent to the house — provides a ceremony space of unusual rural Devon intimacy.
Salcombe Estuary, the South Hams Coastline and Dartmoor
Buckland Tout Saints sits above the Kingsbridge estuary — one of Devon’s most beautiful and least-developed tidal inlets, a ria running eight miles north from the sea at Salcombe whose steep-wooded sides and blue water reflect the South Devon light. Salcombe, five miles south, is the most spectacularly sited estuary town in Devon: the town’s coloured houses on the steep hillside above the estuary’s mouth, the North and South Sands beaches immediately below, and the sandbar at the estuary’s entrance framing the view out to sea provide a coastal portrait setting of outstanding natural beauty. Dartmoor’s southern edge — the Avon Dam, the Shipley Bridge granite outcrops and the open moorland above Dean Prior — is twenty minutes north and provides mountain-scale moorland portraits as a complete contrast to the estuarine coastal setting.