Wedding Photographer Lanhydrock House — Victorian National Trust Country House, Bodmin Moor and the Fowey Valley
Lanhydrock House near Bodmin is National Trust Cornwall’s most comprehensively preserved and most visited Victorian country house — a seventeenth-century house rebuilt after the fire of 1881 in the High Victorian style by the Robartes family, whose surviving seventeenth-century gatehouse and the formal topiary yew garden present a remarkable contrast with the Victorian domestic architecture of the servants’ wing, the kitchen and the family rooms that together constitute England’s most complete surviving Victorian country house interior landscape. For Lanhydrock House wedding photography, the house’s combination of the formal Victorian exterior, the seventeenth-century gatehouse and chapel, the woodland landscape of the Fowey valley estate and the Bodmin Moor horizon above the estate’s northern boundary provide a portrait environment of extraordinary historical and landscape diversity.
The Gatehouse, the Topiary Garden and the Victorian House
Lanhydrock’s seventeenth-century gatehouse — the formal entrance arch of granite with the Robartes arms carved above, flanked by the herbaceous borders and the topiary yew drums that survived the 1881 fire — provides the primary architectural portrait backdrop of the estate: the formal approach through the gatehouse arch, the topiary garden’s geometric clipped yews and the house’s Victorian facade visible beyond create a portrait composition of English Victorian country house formal arrival of exceptional completeness. The chapel’s plaster ceiling (the only surviving seventeenth-century interior in the house, with the family arms and the Old Testament scenes in high relief) provides an interior portrait setting of pre-Victorian Cornish domestic religious character. The Victorian kitchen, the servants’ hall and the family dining room together constitute the most completely preserved sequence of Victorian domestic service life in any National Trust house in England.
The Fowey Valley Woodland, Bodmin Moor and the Cornish Countryside
Lanhydrock’s estate woodland — the ancient oak and beech woodland of the Fowey valley descending from the house’s terraced garden to the river valley below, supplemented by the rhododendron garden planted in the 1930s whose May-June flowering provides a specific Cornish acidic-soil colour explosion — provides the broadest available portrait landscape range at any National Trust Cornish house. The Fowey river valley below the estate, running south toward Lostwithiel and Fowey harbour, provides a deep wooded valley portrait setting of ancient Cornish oak woodland character. Bodmin Moor — accessible via the A30 in twenty minutes, with its ancient granite tors, stone circles (The Hurlers and the Trethevy Quoit) and the open moorland heath — provides a wild Cornish upland portrait setting in direct contrast to the formal Victorian house and garden above the wooded valley.