Wedding Photographer Yorkshire — the Dales, the Moors, Fountains Abbey and the Yorkshire Coast
Yorkshire is England’s largest county (before administrative division) and its most varied landscape county — a county of two national parks (Yorkshire Dales and North Yorkshire Moors), four UNESCO World Heritage Sites (Fountains Abbey, Studley Royal, Saltaire and Brimham Rocks in the Dales) and a coastline whose chalk cliffs at Flamborough Head, the North York Moors’ cliffed heathland above Robin Hood’s Bay and the dramatic fishing harbour of Staithes provide a northern coastal portrait landscape of considerable energy and drama. For Yorkshire wedding photography, the county’s extraordinary concentration of landscape and heritage portrait settings — from Harrogate’s early twentieth-century spa town through Castle Howard’s Baroque park to Whitby Abbey’s clifftop ruin — provides portrait environments of English northern landscape and cultural history of unmatched breadth.
Fountains Abbey, Castle Howard and the Historic Country Houses
Fountains Abbey — the largest and most complete ruined Cistercian abbey in England, with the celebrated east window of the Chapel of the Nine Altars and the undercroft’s 91-metre nave within the UNESCO World Heritage Studley Royal Water Garden — provides a Cistercian ruin portrait setting of quite extraordinary scale and completeness. Castle Howard — Sir John Vanbrugh’s Baroque palace (1699–1712) for the 3rd Earl of Carlisle, with the Great Court’s Baroque garden structures, the lake and the Atlas Fountain’s south parterre visible across the planted Great Avenue — provides North Yorkshire’s most celebrated country house portrait setting of English Baroque country house of considerable grandeur.
Whitby Abbey, Robin Hood’s Bay and the Yorkshire Coast
Whitby Abbey — the clifftop Benedictine ruin above the North Sea, the site of the Synod of Whitby (664 CE) and Bram Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula’s English arrival, with the thirteenth-century Gothic arcade of the nave’s surviving walls above the 199-step approach from the harbour below — provides a coastal clifftop Gothic ruin portrait setting of Gothic Romantic character unique in England. Robin Hood’s Bay’s steep cobbled streets tumbling to the sea, the ravine village’s pantile-roofed cottages and the foreshore’s fossil-rich shale provide a specific fishing village portrait setting of dramatic Yorkshire coastal character. The North Yorkshire Moors’ heather bloom in August provides a hilltop heathland portrait of purple-gold colour.