Wedding Photographer Suffolk — the Heritage Coast, Lavenham and the Suffolk Countryside
Suffolk is one of England’s most continuously beautiful counties — a low-lying landscape of ancient farmland, medieval wool towns, navigable estuaries and a coast that has been designated a Heritage Coast for the quality and variety of its natural and historic character. The Suffolk coast from Felixstowe north to Kessingland passes through the RSPB reserve at Minsmere, the ruined priory and fishing village at Dunwich (which has been falling into the sea since the thirteenth century), the shingle spits and Orford Ness military testing landscape and the town of Aldeburgh whose music festival remains one of the most prestigious in England. For Suffolk wedding photography, the county provides a range of venue types and landscape settings that is among the most comprehensive in the east of England.
Lavenham, Kersey and the Medieval Wool Towns
Lavenham is the finest surviving medieval wool town in England — a settlement that reached its peak prosperity in the early sixteenth century and whose decline thereafter preserved its entire medieval building fabric intact: the Guildhall of c.1530, the de Vere House with its carved pargetting, the Church of St Peter and St Paul with its massive Perpendicular tower (at 141 feet, the tallest in Suffolk) and the continuous timber-framed streetscape of the Market Place and Water Street. Kersey, Cavendish, Long Melford (with Melford Hall and Kentwell Hall) and Clare all provide further medieval wool town portrait settings whose visual quality at any season is immediately and intensely Suffolk in character. Bury St Edmunds — the Georgian county town with the cathedral in the ancient abbey gardens — provides a more formal, civic portrait setting.
The Suffolk Coast, the Deben and the Orwell Estuaries
The Deben estuary — the nine-mile river between Woodbridge and Felixstowe Ferry — is the most beautiful inland estuary in Suffolk: the tide mills at Woodbridge, the Sutton Hoo burial mounds above the east bank, the Ramsholt Arms at the river’s edge and the wide open sky above the marshes and mudflats create a portrait landscape of extraordinary fenland coastal beauty. The Orwell estuary between Harwich, Ipswich and Pin Mill provides working-port character: the sailing barges drawn up on the hard at Pin Mill (the largest collection of Bawley and Thames barge vessels in existence), the estuary views from Freston Tower and the Orwell Country Park’s woodland fringe above the tidal water. Both estuaries are accessible within an hour of any Suffolk wedding venue.