Wedding Photographer Hertford — County Town, Hertford Castle and the Lea Navigation
Hertford is the county town of Hertfordshire — a compact market town on the River Lea at its confluence with the Mimram, Beane and Rib, whose Norman castle (with the surviving Norman gatehouse), the Victorian market square and the Georgian and Victorian townscape of a prosperous county town provide a modest but distinguished portrait setting for couples marrying at Hertford’s various town centre and surrounding village venues. For Hertford wedding photography, the town’s medieval and Georgian character is enriched by the surrounding Hertfordshire countryside of the Lea valley, the ancient commons of the Hertford Heath and the broader estate landscape of mid-Hertfordshire between the M25 and Cambridge.
Hertford Castle, the Market Square and the River Lea
Hertford Castle — whose surviving fourteenth-century gatehouse stands above the castle grounds now maintained as a formal garden open to the public — provides a medieval fortified portrait backdrop of considerable compact Norman military character within the town itself. The castle grounds, with their formal planting and the Lea mill stream below, provide a riverside portrait setting immediately adjacent to the gatehouse. The River Lea through Hertford — with its navigation towpath, the Victorian maltings buildings above the bank and the willows trailing in the slow current — provides a level-landscape waterside portrait setting of East Herts countryside character. The market square’s Victorian and Georgian commercial buildings and the Norman church of All Saints on the Fore Street provide town-centre architectural portrait settings of conventional county town character.
Hatfield House, Brocket Hall and the Hertfordshire Landscape
Hertfordshire’s principal great houses are all accessible from Hertford within thirty minutes: Hatfield House — the Jacobean palace of Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, built 1607–12 adjacent to the Old Palace where Elizabeth I spent her childhood, with the formal gardens restored to seventeenth-century design — provides country house portrait settings of Jacobean grandeur twelve miles south-west. Brocket Hall — the Palladian mansion associated with two Victorian Prime Ministers, with its lake and Palladian bridge — is fifteen miles west above the Lea. The Beane valley above Hertford, the Tewin Water estate landscape and the ancient Hertfordshire commons provide a green and quietly beautiful countryside of mature parkland trees and chalk river valleys within ten minutes of the town.