Wedding Photographer Deene Park — Tudor and Elizabethan Manor, Five Centuries of the Brudenell Family
Deene Park is one of Northamptonshire’s most distinguished private historic houses — a Grade I listed Tudor and Elizabethan manor near Corby in continuous ownership by the Brudenell family since 1514, whose Great Hall, the Elizabethan south front, the medieval church of St Peter adjacent to the house and the formal park lake together constitute an ensemble of Tudor and Elizabethan domestic architecture of great completeness and historical authenticity. The house’s association with James Thomas Brudenell, the seventh Earl of Cardigan who led the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in October 1854, gives it a Victorian military history of extraordinary drama whose memorabilia is displayed in the house’s private rooms. For Deene Park wedding photography, the Elizabethan quadrangular house, the walled garden and the park’s formal landscape together provide a complete Tudor and Elizabethan portrait environment.
The Elizabethan South Front, the Great Hall and the Walled Garden
Deene Park’s Elizabethan south front — the long, mullioned-windowed range of the sixteenth-century house above the approach drive and the formal topiary garden — provides a portrait backdrop of Elizabethan domestic architecture of highly polished quality in the ironstone that characterises Northamptonshire’s most distinguished Tudor houses. The interior Great Hall — with its original Tudor screen and the family portraits spanning five centuries of Brudenell ownership — provides an interior portrait setting of Tudor institutional character whose low-beamed ceiling and the stone mullion windows create available-light portrait compositions of considerable period atmosphere. The walled kitchen garden — restored to productive and ornamental use, with the bee boles in the south wall and the Victorian cutting garden borders — provides a formal garden portrait space of estate-kitchen-garden character.
The Park, St Peter’s Church and the Northamptonshire Countryside
Deene Park’s formal landscape — the lake formed from the River Willow dammed in the eighteenth century, the estate church of St Peter immediately east of the house (with the Brudenell family chapel and the seventh Earl’s Light Brigade memorabilia tablets) and the parkland’s specimen trees and grass walks — provides a complete estate landscape portrait sequence of lawn, lake and church tower set against the park’s tree screen. The surrounding Northamptonshire countryside — the ironstone hills of the Welland valley, the Great Oakley woodland and the ancient hunting forests of the Rockingham Forest whose boundary runs along the estate’s north edge — provides a deeper landscape portrait context of the ancient Midland hunting country. Rockingham Castle, four miles south, provides a Norman and Elizabethan fortified manor portrait setting in complement to Deene’s domestic character.