Wedding Photographer Taunton — Taunton Castle, the Quantock Hills and the Somerset Levels
Taunton is Somerset’s county town at the foot of the Quantock Hills — a market town of considerable medieval depth, with Taunton Castle’s Norman great tower and the gatehouse of the medieval castle, the twelfth-century Priory’s remnants visible in the town and the Somerset County Cricket Ground’s famous summer backdrop of the Quantock and Blackdown Hills above the outfield. For Taunton wedding photography, the county town’s proximity to the Quantock Hills AONB (England’s first AONB, designated 1956) — accessible fifteen minutes north-west above the Bridgwater Bay coastal plain — and the Somerset Levels’ extraordinary flat pastoral landscape south-east provide portrait landscapes of English national landscape heritage of considerable variety within a single portrait day.
The Quantock Hills AONB, Holford Combe and the Coastal Ridge
The Quantock Hills — the 15-mile ridge of Devonian sandstone north-west of Taunton, rising to 384 metres at Wills Neck and offering unbroken ridge walking above the Bristol Channel in the north and the Vale of Taunton Deane in the south, with the open heathland summits of Dead Woman’s Ditch and Crowcombe Park Gate providing hilltop portrait settings of considerable moorland character — provide England’s first AONB landscape as a hilltop portrait destination. Holford Combe — the wooded valley below the Quantocks’ north slope where Coleridge and Wordsworth walked and composed while living at Nether Stowey in 1797–8 — provides a deep-combed wooded valley portrait setting of Romantic literary association. The coastal ridge above Kilve and East Quantoxhead’s beach fossils provide coastal Quantock portrait settings.
Taunton Castle, French Weir Park and the River Tone
Taunton Castle — the medieval castle of the Bishops of Winchester, with the Norman great tower and the gatehouse’s impressive medieval masonry surviving as the county museum building — provides a castle portrait setting in the town centre of considerable Norman and medieval character. French Weir Park’s riverside meadows along the River Tone — the weir pool and the willow-lined towpath immediately behind the town centre — provide accessible river park portrait settings. Hestercombe Gardens six miles north-east of Taunton — the National Trust estate with the Lutyens and Jekyll designed formal garden (1904–09) and the eighteenth-century landscape garden of Coplestone Warre Bampfylde above — provide an outstanding garden portrait destination within easy reach of the county town.