Wedding Photographer North Devon — Croyde Bay, Saunton Sands, the Taw Estuary and Exmoor
North Devon is England’s most spectacularly diverse coastal and moorland landscape for wedding photography — a stretch of north-facing Atlantic coastline and Exmoor’s high moorland that runs from the wide-open surf beaches of Croyde and Saunton Sands in the west to the Taw and Torridge estuaries at Bideford and the Hartland peninsula’s savage rocky cliffs in the south-west, all administered from the market towns of Barnstaple and Bideford. For North Devon wedding photography, the landscape’s diversity — from the two-mile arc of Saunton Sands backed by the dunes of Braunton Burrows to the Exmoor combes and Dartmoor’s northern tors — provides portrait settings of maximum Atlantic coastal drama combined with the deep green valley landscapes of Devon inland.
Croyde Bay, Saunton Sands and the Braunton Burrows Dunes
Croyde Bay — the compact, family-scale surf beach enclosed within the headlands of Baggy Point (National Trust) to the north and Croyde Point to the south — provides a miniature enclosed bay portrait setting of great intimacy and Atlantic beach character. The rock pools of the headlands, the Atlantic swell breaking on Baggy Point’s wave-cut platform and the evening light raking across the bay from the west provide portrait settings of considerable tidal dynamism. Saunton Sands — the three-mile straight west-facing beach backed by three miles of Braunton Burrows dunes (designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and the largest sand dune system in England) — provides a wide-open beach portrait setting of oceanic scale: the beach’s absolute flatness, the Atlantic horizon and the dunes’ moving skyline provide portrait compositions of elemental coastal simplicity.
The Taw Estuary, Hartland Point and the Exmoor Combes
The Taw and Torridge estuaries at Instow and Appledore — where the two rivers combine before draining into Bideford Bay, with the sandbar visible at low tide and the Lundy Island horizon visible in clear weather thirty miles out to sea — provide a tidal estuary portrait setting of specific North Devon estuarine character. Hartland Point and Hartland Quay — the westernmost point of Devon’s north coast, where the Devonian shale and sandstone have been folded vertically into the most dramatic cliff geology in England south of the Pembrokeshire coast — provides a savage Gothic cliff portrait setting thirty miles east of Bude of extraordinary geological drama. Exmoor’s high moor above Lynton and Lynmouth — the open purple-heather moorland of the Chains and the coastal combes dropping steeply to the Bristol Channel at Valley of the Rocks — provides a specific upland coastal portrait setting.