Wedding Photographer Wiltshire — Stonehenge, Stourhead, Lacock Abbey and the Chalk Downland
Wiltshire is England’s most ancient-landscape county — a chalk downland plateau of the Salisbury Plain’s vast military training area surrounding the Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments that constitute the most extraordinary prehistoric landscape in Europe: Stonehenge’s UNESCO World Heritage trilithon monument, the Avebury stone circle’s 1.3-kilometre diameter henge, Silbury Hill’s Neolithic chalk mound and the Ridgeway’s ancient trackway along the chalk plateau. For Wiltshire wedding photography, the county’s extraordinary concentration of landscape portrait settings — from Stourhead’s National Trust landscape garden (the most celebrated eighteenth-century landscape garden in England) through Lacock Abbey’s medieval cloister to the Vale of Pewsey’s white horse chalk carvings — provides portrait environments of English ancient landscape and country house making of unrivalled historical depth.
Stonehenge, Avebury and the Neolithic Wiltshire Landscape
Stonehenge — the UNESCO World Heritage trilithon monument on Salisbury Plain, built between 3000 and 1500 BCE in three construction phases using bluestones from the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire and the Marlborough Downs’ sarsen sandstone, whose inner horseshoe of trilithons and the outer circle’s surviving lintel stones provide the most internationally recognised prehistoric monument in the world — provides a wedding portrait backdrop of global historical significance. Photography at Stonehenge for day visitors is possible from the perimeter path (the stones themselves accessible for special private access). Avebury’s 1.3-kilometre henge — the world’s largest prehistoric stone circle, with the village inside the henge — provides a more accessible and intimate megalith portrait setting.
Stourhead, Lacock Abbey and the Wiltshire Country House Landscape
Stourhead — the National Trust landscape garden near Stourton created c.1741–65 by Henry Hoare II, with the Pantheon’s domed rotunda above the artificial lake, the Temple of Flora and the Bristol Cross reflected in the lake’s mirrored surface — provides the most celebrated and most photogenically composed eighteenth-century English landscape garden portrait setting: the circular lake walk’s sequence of temples and bridges in the reflected water provides portrait compositions that represent the English landscape garden aesthetic at its most idealised. Lacock Abbey — the National Trust medieval Augustinian cloister of c.1232 near Chippenham, converted to a private house by the Talbot family and the birthplace of photography (Fox Talbot’s first photographic negative taken at Lacock in 1835) — provides a medieval cloister portrait setting.