What We Did In Our Six Weeks Holidays?
How a plan to finally get married turned into four months of construction, fifty decoupaged jam jars and a brand-new woodland wedding venue in the Yorkshire Dales...
As with all things Hartlington, we are not ones to sit on our laurels. There are always things to be done in the cottages, the gardens and the woods.
Those of you who know us will also know that we rarely follow a conventional path, so it should probably come as no surprise that at the start of this year we came up with an idea that could be deemed our biggest showstopper so far.
We Decided to Get Married.
Yes, lots of people thought we already were, but to be honest we'd just never got round to it. So, at our New Year's Eve dinner, we announced to family and friends that 2026 would be the year we finally did.
First Problem: When?
Finding a gap in an already full cottage calendar was the first stumbling block. We wanted to be able to offer our own wedding guests the opportunity to stay in our cottages, but summer availability was already decidedly thin on the ground.
Then two unusually placed Monday changeovers left both cottages free for three nights.
That was that.
15th August it was.
Then Came the Question of Where...
I had long been nagging John to let me hold woodland weddings. We are blessed with some amazing spaces here, and as neither of us are exactly spring chickens, a conventional wedding somehow didn't sit right with either of us.
A woodland wedding was agreed, but with one proviso from John: if we were going to do this, we would have to create a proper ceremony space.
I had anticipated a small rustic arch nestled amongst the trees.
John wanted a roof (Yorkshire weather), a proper floor, terraced seating (the wood slopes), and the facility for proper sound and lighting.
Never Try to Argue with a Sound and Lighting Engineer...
I then said, "OK, if it's a proper venue, we need facilities."
Toilets. Somewhere for guests to wait and sit before the ceremony. A marquee so caterers could provide fizz and canapés.
And so Hartlington Abbey was born.
We quickly realised that, as with all things Hartlington, this was going to turn into a major construction project.
From Woodland to Wedding Venue
A team of trusty carpenters was brought in and four very large solid oak crooks were purchased.
Our beautiful woodland was temporarily ripped to pieces by a digger as we excavated to find a connection to the main sewer for the new guest toilets.
There were moments when it looked rather less like an intimate woodland wedding venue and rather more like a small civil engineering project.
Four months of excavation, building, landscaping and rather a lot of head-scratching followed.
But, in the nick of time, the structure was finished.
Suddenly we had a woodland wedding venue.
In the heart of the Yorkshire Dales.
And we were about to become the first people to get married in it.
Then I Decided to Do the Flowers...
In true Penny fashion, I decided I wasn't going to buy in all the flowers. I was going to deck the woods myself.
As a team of one, however, I did at least have enough sense to decide on a mixture of silk and fresh flowers. It gave me time to decorate the ceremony structure and surrounding buildings without trying to do everything within the three-day lifespan of fresh flowers.
And given that the archway and legs total around 25 metres, there was absolutely no way I was going to manage a full fresh-flower spectacular in three days.
I did, however, have another bright idea.
Rustic decoupaged jam jars, mounted on fencing pins and filled with fresh flowers, would line the woodland paths.
Brilliant.
Until I realised I needed to make fifty of them.
Meanwhile, the whole Hartlington team set to work: clearing paths, recreating green spaces where diggers had scourged the earth, spreading several tons of woodchip, creating lighting rigs and pruning wayward bushes.
All to create the wedding space we'd imagined.
Not just for us, but hopefully for other couples like us who want to celebrate their day their way.
And Then We Got Married
On 15th August, around fifty of our family and friends joined us beneath the trees.
We teamed up with local expert caterers Browns Kitchen, who provided the most amazing canapés and later treated our evening guests to a sumptuous outdoor barbecue.
There were flowers everywhere. There was music. There was fizz. There was colour.
And, somewhat miraculously after four months of diggers, carpenters, oak crooks, woodchip and jam jars, there was actually a wedding.
We had the most amazing day.
But perhaps the loveliest thing was finally discovering whether our slightly mad idea had actually worked.
It had.
Not because everything looked like somebody else's idea of a perfect wedding. Quite the opposite.
It was colourful, noisy, relaxed, full of people we love and completely us.
And that, more than anything, is what we hope we've created in the wood.
We don't want every wedding at Hartlington to look like ours.
We want every wedding here to feel as though it belongs completely to the people getting married.
Because after all the building, digging, decorating, flower arranging, wood chipping and fifty bloody jam jars, that's what we learned: