Wedding Photographer Saltmarshe Hall — Georgian Hall above the Ouse, the East Riding and Howden Minster
Saltmarshe Hall is one of the East Riding of Yorkshire’s most gracefully proportioned and most privately characterful Georgian country houses — a handsome early nineteenth-century hall above the south bank of the tidal lower Ouse at Saltmarshe, near the market town of Howden and the confluence of the Ouse and Derwent where the river’s tidal reach extends above the Humber estuary. The hall’s position above the river’s tidal flats — with the Ouse’s broad tidal water visible from the grounds and the Lincolnshire plain beyond the north bank — provides a portrait setting of tidal river lowland character specific to this reach of the lower Ouse between York and Goole. For Saltmarshe Hall wedding photography, the Georgian house’s proportioned facades, the riverside parkland and the Howden Minster’s medieval towers above the market town combine to create an East Riding portrait environment of considerable understated character.
The Georgian Hall, the Parkland and the Ouse Riverside
Saltmarshe Hall’s principal garden facade — the Georgian brick and stone house overlooking the parkland south of the river bank, with mature specimen trees and the formal kitchen garden in the walled enclosure to the east — provides a portrait backdrop of Georgian country house architecture on a domestic human scale contrasting with the monumental grandeur of the more famous East Riding houses. The parkland’s riverside edge — the walk north through the garden to the Ouse’s bank, with the tidal river’s broad flat expanse and the Lincolnshire farmland on the north bank visible across the water — provides a tidal river lowland portrait setting of East Yorkshire river plain character. The walled kitchen garden provides an enclosed portrait setting of productive Georgian garden character.
Howden Minster, the Humber Bridge and the East Riding Plain
Howden Minster — the magnificent ruined and restored medieval collegiate church of St Peter and St Paul in Howden market town three miles east, whose enormous crossing tower, the roofless octagonal chapter house and the restored nave (the west window’s complete Gothic tracery surviving) provide one of the East Riding’s most impressive and least-celebrated medieval churches — provides a Gothic medieval portrait setting of considerable ruined church character within easy drive. The Humber Bridge — the 1981 single-span suspension bridge of 1,410 metres (the fourth-longest in the world at opening) spanning the Humber ten miles south — provides an industrial-engineering portrait backdrop of considerable scale. The East Riding’s flat plain — the reclaimed agricultural landscape south of the Wolds, with the Beverley Minster visible on clear days — provides a specific flat-landscape portrait setting of East Yorkshire agricultural plain.