Wedding Photographer Combe Grove — Georgian Manor in the Limpley Stoke Valley, Bath and the Midford Brook
Combe Grove is a Georgian manor house wedding venue in the Limpley Stoke valley — a narrow, steep-wooded valley running south from Bath between the Midford Brook and the city’s southern hills, whose landscape character combines the formal Georgian setting of the house above with the wild, ancient-wooded valley below in a combination unusual at a Bath-area venue. The house’s elevated ridge position provides views across the Limpley Stoke valley that are among the most beautiful of any Bath-accessible venue, with the valley’s woodland and the Midford Brook visible below the estate in conditions from the spring’s fresh green canopy to the autumn’s deep orange and gold. For Combe Grove wedding photography, this valley-top Georgian setting combines formal period house portrait with landscape views of exceptional natural beauty within fifteen minutes of Bath’s city centre.
The Georgian House, the Formal Gardens and the Valley Views
Combe Grove’s original Georgian house — with its formal garden terrace looking south across the valley and the stone ha-ha above the wooded slope — provides the primary architectural portrait setting: the classical proportions of the Georgian facade, the formal garden’s box-edged beds and the panoramic valley view beyond the terrace edge combine in a composed portrait setting of Georgian landscape design quality. The valley below — accessible via a steep path through the estate’s woodland — provides an intermediate portrait landscape of mature beech and oak woodland, limestone gorge walls and the railway viaduct above Limpley Stoke visible through the canopy, that contrasts entirely with the formal house setting above. The combination of hilltop formal house and wooded valley below is unusual in the Bath-area venue landscape.
Bath, the Prior Park Landscape Garden and the Avon Valley
Bath’s UNESCO World Heritage city centre — the Royal Crescent, the Circus, the Roman Baths, Pulteney Bridge and the Pump Room — is fifteen minutes from Combe Grove via the A36 and provides the full Georgian city portrait landscape for any Combe Grove couple who want to incorporate Bath’s formal architecture in their wedding day session. Prior Park Landscape Garden (National Trust) — Ralph Allen’s eighteenth-century designed landscape above Bath, with the Palladian bridge (one of only four in the world), the serpentine lake and the amphitheatre views across Bath below — is ten minutes from Combe Grove and provides the most refined English landscape garden portrait setting in the Bath area. The Avon valley towpath and the Dundas Aqueduct at Limpley Stoke provide a canal-era industrial landscape portrait setting of considerable charm.