Wedding Photographer Stapleford Park — Seventeenth-Century Country House, the Estate Church and the Rutland Border
Stapleford Park near Melton Mowbray is one of Leicestershire’s most distinguished and most historically layered country house hotel wedding venues — a large country house of seventeenth-century origin, significantly enlarged in the Victorian period, set in 500 acres of parkland in the Wreake valley near the Rutland county border, with the estate church of St Mary Magdalen in the parkland alongside the house and the walled gardens and fishing lakes of the parkland complex providing a complete country estate wedding venue of considerable historical depth. For Stapleford Park wedding photography, the seventeenth-century house’s varied facade, the estate church’s medieval interior and the Rutland-border parkland landscape provide a portrait environment of East Midlands country house completeness.
The Country House Facade, the Victorian Extensions and the Formal Garden
Stapleford Park’s main house — the varying facades of the seventeenth-century core (with the distinctive gabled frontage of the 1633 Sherard bay and the later Victorian extensions creating an eclectic but characterful elevational sequence) provide exterior architectural portrait backdrops of English country house architectural evolution from the Stuart period through the Victorian era. The formal gardens — the terraced walled garden with its rose borders, the kitchen garden and the water garden — provide enclosed garden portrait settings of Victorian country house formal garden design character. The fishing lakes in the parkland below the house provide waterside portrait settings of rural Leicestershire farmland character.
The Estate Church, the Parkland and the Rutland Border Landscape
Stapleford’s estate church of St Mary Magdalen — the medieval and Victorian estate church in the parkland adjacent to the house, with the Sherard family’s memorials and the Victorian restoration of the medieval fabric providing a small intimate church of considerable charm — provides a ceremony and churchyard portrait setting of the English estate church type. The parkland’s 500 acres of managed grassland, specimen trees and the fishing lakes below the house provide a complete English country house park portrait landscape. The Rutland Water reservoir — accessible ten miles east, with the Normanton Church reflection and the Hambleton peninsula — provides a day-after portrait destination of national reservoir landscape quality. Belvoir Castle’s ridge-top silhouette is visible to the north-east on clear days from the parkland’s upper terraces.