Wedding Photographer Wotton House — the Surrey Hills, Leith Hill and the North Downs
Wotton House near Dorking in Surrey is one of the county’s most distinguished eighteenth-century country house hotel wedding venues — a large classical house in the Surrey Hills AONB, associated with the diarist John Evelyn (whose family owned the Wotton estate for three centuries) and set in parkland with views across the Surrey Hills to Leith Hill’s Greensand ridge above and Denbies Wine Estate’s vine-terraced hillside to the north. For Wotton House wedding photography, the house’s parkland setting on the Surrey Hills’ greensand upper ridge, Leith Hill’s accessible hilltop tower (the highest point in South East England) within three miles and Denbies’ English vineyard portrait setting provide portrait environments of Surrey Hills AONB country house of considerable natural and cultural quality.
The Wotton House Parkland, the Formal Garden and the Driveway
Wotton House’s parkland — the eighteenth-century designed landscape attributed to John Evelyn’s gardening in the older tradition and later developed in the landscape style, with the lake, the walled garden’s terrace and the kitchen garden’s outbuildings providing a variety of parkland portrait settings — provides portraiture of English country house landscape character set against the Surrey Hills ridge’s greensand profile. The formal garden’s terraces and the kitchen garden’s brick-and-yew topiary hedging provide enclosed garden portrait settings adjacent to the house. The driveway’s mature tree canopy — the lime-lined approach typical of its period — provides a processional driveway portrait setting.
Leith Hill Tower, Denbies Vineyard and the Surrey Hills AONB
Leith Hill — three miles north-west from Wotton House, with the National Trust’s Gothic tower of Richard Hull (1765) on the Greensand ridge summit at 294 metres providing the highest point in South East England and the most panoramic viewpoint in Surrey — provides a hilltop tower portrait destination of considerable landscape drama and historical interest. Denbies Wine Estate — two miles north, with the 265-acre Surrey vineyard’s vine rows’ seasonal colour and the cellar door building — provides a vineyard portrait setting of English wine country character. Box Hill’s chalk escarpment and Polesden Lacey’s National Trust rose garden are accessible within thirty minutes.