Wedding Photographer King John’s Hunting Lodge — Medieval Hunting Forest, Rutland and the Eleanor Cross
King John’s Hunting Lodge near Geddington in Northamptonshire is a medieval barn and estate wedding venue in the ancient hunting country of the Rockingham Forest — a part of England whose continuous royal connection from the Norman Conquest through the medieval hunting forest administration to the present day has preserved more of its medieval landscape character than almost anywhere else in the English Midlands. Geddington village — the immediate setting of the venue — contains the best-preserved of England’s three surviving Eleanor Crosses, erected by Edward I in 1291 at each place where his wife Eleanor of Castile’s coffin rested on its journey from Lincoln to London. For King John’s Hunting Lodge wedding photography, the medieval barn, the Geddington village and the Eleanor Cross together provide a portrait setting of remarkable royal historical depth.
The Medieval Barn, the Hunting Lodge Character and the Estate
The medieval barn at King John’s Hunting Lodge — the primary ceremony and reception space, with its stone walls, exposed timber roof trusses and the original agricultural building’s conversion maintaining the scale and materials of the medieval hunting estate — provides an interior portrait setting of deep medieval character available at only a small number of genuinely medieval agricultural buildings still in use as wedding venues in England. The estate’s setting within the Rockingham Forest hunting ground — the ancient royal forest whose boundaries from the early medieval period have been substantially maintained in the woodland’s survival — provides a portal to the medieval landscape of deer park, ancient forest and royal hunting terrain that gives the venue its specific historical character.
The Geddington Eleanor Cross, Rockingham Castle and the Nene Valley
The Eleanor Cross at Geddington — the thirteenth-century Caen stone cross in the village square, detailed with the carved shields of England and Castile and Leon and the canopied effigy niches of Eleanor herself — provides an exterior portrait setting of royal medieval memorial character unique to this one village in England: no comparable medieval royal monument survives in such complete and accessible condition. Rockingham Castle — three miles south-west, the Norman castle converted by Edward Watson in the Tudor period and still in private ownership with its views across the Welland valley into Leicestershire — provides a second medieval royal site with substantial Norman earthwork and Tudor house character. The Nene valley south of Geddington and Deene Park (Tudor manor, five miles east) extend the medieval Northamptonshire portrait landscape.