Wedding Photographer Pennard House — Georgian Farmhouse, the Walled Garden and the Somerset Levels
Pennard House near Shepton Mallet is one of Somerset’s most quietly beautiful privately-owned Georgian country farmhouse wedding venues — a late Georgian house of warm Bath stone with its walled kitchen garden, the yew-hedged croquet lawn, the orchard of old Somerset apple varieties and the flower meadows descending toward the Wheathill valley whose view north across the Somerset Levels to Glastonbury Tor provides a portrait backdrop of singular Somerset landscape character. The house’s intimate scale — a genuine working farm estate rather than a converted institutional facility — gives Pennard its specific quality of relaxed country-house family life. For Pennard House wedding photography, the combination of the Bath stone facade, the walled garden’s Edwardian productive kitchen-garden character and the Somerset Levels view provide a portrait setting of gentle Georgian Somerset domestic landscape.
The Bath Stone House, the Walled Garden and the Orchard
Pennard House’s principal portrait settings cluster around the kitchen garden complex — the walled garden’s warm Bath stone walls with the herbaceous borders, the trained fruit and the cutting garden providing a rich, colour-saturated portrait environment of English walled garden tradition at peak in July and August. The orchard of old Somerset apple varieties — the cider apple trees in the walled paddock beyond the kitchen garden, with great gnarled trunks and the blossom in late April and cider apples in October — provides seasonal portrait settings of considerable charm at both the spring blossom and the autumn harvest extremes. The yew-hedged croquet lawn between the house’s south front and the walled garden provides a classic English lawn portrait setting of formal Georgian country house domestic character.
The Somerset Levels View, Glastonbury Tor and the Mendip Hills
Pennard’s view north from the flower meadows below the orchard — the panorama of the Somerset Levels’ flat flooded plain stretching north to Glastonbury Tor’s cone and beyond to the Polden Hills and the Quantock upland on the horizon — provides the estate’s most distinctively Somerset portrait backdrop: the Levels’ extraordinary flatness and the Tor’s iconic profile provide a portrait landscape of mythological Somerset depth within a ten-minute walk of the house. The Mendip Hills — the limestone upland visible south from Pennard’s higher fields, with the Cheddar Gorge and Priddy’s ancient lead-mining commons on the plateau above — provide a second upland portrait setting within twenty minutes for golden-hour Mendip ridge walks.