Wedding Photographer St Neots — the Great Ouse Riverside, Paxton Pits and the Cambridgeshire Meadows
St Neots is Cambridgeshire’s largest town and one of the county’s most distinctively river-centred settlements — a market town of medieval origin expanded into one of England’s first designated New Towns built on the Great Ouse’s broad floodplain, where the Market Square’s medieval church of St Mary the Virgin and the nineteenth-century town hall face a prosperous market square and the Great Ouse’s meadow floodplain provides open-sky portrait settings within minutes of the town centre. For St Neots wedding photography, the town’s riverside meadows, the Paxton Pits Nature Reserve’s flooded gravel pit lakes and the open Cambridgeshire farmland immediately beyond the town boundary together with Cambridge city’s portrait resources only fifteen miles east provide a portrait landscape of river, open water and English market town character of considerable East Midlands variety.
The Great Ouse Meadows, the Riverside Walk and Ouse Valley Way
The Great Ouse at St Neots — the broad, slow chalk-fed river at its point of maximum width above Ely, with the riverside meadow path connecting the Town Bridge’s medieval arch continuation downstream alongside the willow-lined banks and the rowers and narrowboats of the active leisure river — provides a portrait setting of flat English river meadow character of the type particularly associated with the Cambridge and Fens landscape aesthetic: the horizontal floodplain, the reflected sky and the enormous East Anglian cumulus clouds together provide portrait compositions of characteristic Cambridgeshire openness. The Ouse Valley Way’s riverside path south from the town bridge provides accessible meadow portrait settings immediately available.
Paxton Pits, Grafham Water and the Cambridgeshire Farmland
Paxton Pits Nature Reserve — the flooded gravel pit complex immediately south of St Neots at Little Paxton, with the SSSI-designated landscape of open water, wetland margin and the Ouse’s former channel providing extensive wildlife habitat and portrait settings of open-water reflected sky character — provides a second Great Ouse portrait destination of considerable ecological quality and distinctive open-water landscape. Grafham Water — Cambridgeshire’s large reservoir at twelve miles north-west, with the circular cycling and walking trail, the sailing club and the extensive south-facing shore — provides a further reservoir portrait setting with considerable linear water horizon character. The Cambridgeshire farmland’s rolling open fields and the medieval churches of the Ouse valley villages — Offord Cluny, Buckden Palace’s Bishop’s court and Kimbolton Castle — provide portrait destinations within a fifteen-mile radius.