Wedding Photographer Huntingdon — Cromwell’s Town, the Great Ouse and the Nene Valley
Huntingdon is one of England’s most history-saturated market towns — the birthplace of Oliver Cromwell, whose grammar school on the market square is now the Cromwell Museum; a town whose medieval bridges, ancient churches and Victorian civic buildings line the Great Ouse river frontage in a compact but architecturally rich streetscape. For Huntingdon wedding photography, the town’s main charm lies in its combination of historic market town character, the Great Ouse’s meadows and riverside character, and the surrounding Huntingdonshire countryside of ancient fens and large arable estates. Couples who choose venues in the Huntingdon area are typically marrying in the Ouse valley or the country house estates north-east of Cambridgeshire, where the landscape transitions between the chalk uplands and the flat fen-edge.
The Great Ouse, Godmanchester and Houghton Mill
The Great Ouse at Huntingdon — where the ancient two-arched medieval bridge connects Huntingdon to its twin town of Godmanchester opposite — provides a riverbank portrait landscape of mature willows, moored cruisers and the flat water meadows between the two towns that is characteristic of English riverside beauty at its most gentle. Godmanchester itself is the more immediately photogenic settlement: the old island of China Bridge House with its ornamental cascade, the Chinese Bridge over the millstream, Port Holme meadow (one of England’s largest medieval meadows at 193 acres), and the Georgian domestic architecture of Earning Street all reward a walking tour with camera. Houghton Mill — a National Trust water mill on a Great Ouse island six miles downstream — provides a specific rural water-industrial setting unique to this stretch of the Ouse valley.
Hemingford Grey and the Huntingdonshire Villages
Hemingford Grey, two miles downstream of Houghton Mill, contains the oldest continuously inhabited house in England — the Manor of Hemingford Grey, built c.1130 and immortalised as Green Knowe by its former owner Lucy M. Boston. Its Norman windows, the riverside moat and the ancient yew topiary provide a portrait setting of extraordinary historical density on the Ouse bank. The Huntingdonshire village landscape between the A1 and the Great Ouse — Brampton, Buckden, Kimbolton (whose castle held Catherine of Aragon) — provides a sequence of churches, village greens and country lanes that are thoroughly covered with spring blossom in May and harvest gold in August.