Wedding Photographer Oxfordshire — Cotswold Churches, the Vale of White Horse and the Chilterns
Oxfordshire’s wedding landscape extends far beyond Oxford city’s celebrated spires — the county’s southern Vale of White Horse (with the Uffington White Horse cut into the chalk escarpment above the Vale, the Ridgeway’s ancient track along the Down and the Dragon Hill where St George slew the dragon) and its north-west Cotswold border (with the Burford wool churches, the stone-roofed manor houses of the Windrush valley and the Rollright Stones prehistoric circle on the Warwickshire border) provide a portrait landscape of ancient English mythological and vernacular character of the most evocative quality. For Oxfordshire wedding photography, the county’s pre-historic, early medieval and Cotswold vernacular layers provide portrait settings of layered English landscape depth unmatched in any comparable area of southern England.
The Vale of White Horse, Uffington and the Ridgeway
The Uffington White Horse — the stylised Neolithic or Iron Age chalk figure cut in the scarp of the White Horse Hill above the Vale, the oldest chalk hill figure in England at approximately 2,500 to 3,000 years old and maintained by continuous scouring through the centuries — provides the Oxfordshire escarpment’s most evocative portrait setting: the view from the hillfort of Uffington Castle above the horse, looking north across the Vale of White Horse toward Swindon and the Cotswolds, provides a portrait panorama of ancient English landscape occupation of considerable elemental power. The Ridgeway’s chalk track — following the Down’s plateau edge west from the Goring Gap toward Avebury — provides a specific chalk downland hilltop portrait setting of immense heritage value.
Burford and the Cotswold Wool Churches, Minster Lovell and the Windrush
Burford — the hillside Cotswold wool town whose Elizabethan and Jacobean merchants’ houses of honey-coloured limestone line the High Street from the river bridge to the parish church — provides the most architecturally complete of Oxfordshire’s Cotswold stone towns for street and churchyard portrait settings. Burford Priory’s walled garden (a private event space within the historic priory grounds) and the River Windrush’s mill-pond below the bridge provide riverside portrait settings of Cotswold market town character. Minster Lovell Hall — the ruined fifteenth-century hall of the Lovell family above the Windrush meadows four miles east of Burford, a Scheduled Monument whose roofless walls, window tracery and the great hall walls stand intact above the riverside — provides a medieval ruin portrait setting of unusual Oxfordshire romantic quality.