Love in Lockdown

As soon as we walked through the door, we knew Ellingham was the right venue for us. It was really warm and cosy, with all the fires roaring and Anthony, the Managing Director who we met on our first visit, was just so lovely and down-to-earth! We were greeted with big mugs of hot tea and sat by the fire in the blue room for our initial conversation and didn’t want to leave. The service we received from our very first visit at Ellingham Hall wildly outdid any other venue we saw…and we saw a lot!

Our original plan was a huge 130 guest Autumn wedding so we could share our big day with all our family and friends from Northumberland (where I am from) and Dorset (where Kamron’s family are from and where we now live). We had booked a band, almost sorted out everyone’s accommodation and were very excited to enjoy a weekend of festivities at the stunning venue.

Once the pandemic hit and as our wedding date got closer, the team at the Hall guided us through what our various options were when restrictions changed, and changed again!

Our original date was 07.11.2020, until less than a week before this, Boris announced Lockdown 3.0 to was to come into effect from 05.11.2020. That put a stopper on our original date! But, by nothing short of a miracle, we were able to reschedule our day to the 4th November. Our calls with Anthony on the run up to the wedding kept us sane. When we did decide to move our wedding forward by a couple of days at very short notice – they really pulled out all the stops and worked through the night to make it happen for us and we will forever be grateful.

Our family have described our wedding day as “magical”, “a fairy tale” and “just the best day”! Not having over 100 guests present meant our two families really got to know each other, which really means a lot to us as they live a seven-hour car journey apart.

Despite all the last-minute changes, and the stresses of the last year-and-a-bit of planning a wedding during a global pandemic, our wedding really was the best day of our lives – and we wouldn’t have changed a thing! Apart from maybe booking our string trio, Aurora Strings, for longer than we did – they were simply incredible and filled the hall with the most enchanting music!

If there’s any advice we could give to couples it would be 100% be to just go for it! Go ahead, stick to your date and have the best day of your lives with the people around you who you care about most. We only had two small concerns on the days running up to the wedding which was would 15 people look out of place at Ellingham? i.e. reception rooms would look empty with our restricted numbers? Not at all! Even the large airy chapel, where we chose to have our wedding ceremony worked so well.

One of our other concerns was that there wouldn’t be much we could do to keep guests (and ourselves!) entertained for a full day, but we didn’t stop – in the best way! In the absence of an evening of dancing, we had our first dance outside surrounded by sparklers before we all gathered round the newly installed firepit where the Ellingham team surprised us with hot chocolates, marshmallows and extendable forks for melting them! We then retreated inside for a game of “Mr & Mrs” and later in the evening we settled down in the “blue room” for a movie night on a gigantic projector screen with comfy sofas and beanbags, drinks, popcorn, sweets and wedding cake. It was a blissfully busy day!

From the very outset, the amazing Ellingham team could not do enough for us. David and Wendy were fantastic and couldn’t have done any more for us throughout the day itself, nothing was a bother and they felt like an extension of our guestlist!

You won’t regret it one little bit. Secondly choose an amazing photographer and videographer to capture your day in all of its glory – you can then share all the best bits with all the people who weren’t able to attend on the day and they will feel like they were there anyway! We would highly recommend Carn Patrick Photography and Abigail Grace Videography – they were the actual dream team!

Images Carn Patrick Photography