Stirk House Wedding Photographer

Why we love photographing at Stirk House

If you are getting married at Stirk House and want a Stirk House wedding photographer who knows the rooms, this is how we would do your day. The house is at Gisburn on the A59, seven miles up from Clitheroe towards Skipton, right at the top end of the Ribble Valley. It was built in 1635 with stone taken from Sawley Abbey, was called Grange Moor Manor before anyone called it Stirk House, and has been a hotel since 1933. It is Grade II, stone and gabled, with 22 acres of gardens and old woodland round it and Pendle Hill filling the view to the south.

The wedding rooms are all in a line. You walk through the Conservatory, with its living wall of ivy and glass roof, into the Gallery, which is the ceremony room: stone walls, beams, seats for 113. The Ballroom next door takes up to 250 for the breakfast and the evening, with a big skylight, a stage, a fairy-light corridor and a separate lounge. Outside there are two licensed spots, the Pendle View lawn off the Ballroom patio and the Stirk Tree, an old sycamore on a deck strung with lights.

We are two photographers as standard, Lee and Dom. That matters here because the Gallery is a long room and the confetti goes out the front by the stone porch, so one of us is ahead of you every time you move. Full Day Stirk House wedding photography is £1,049 on a weekday and £1,295 at the weekend. Everything else is on the prices page. We are a Blackpool team and the Ribble Valley is a regular drive for us.

Light and timing

The front of Stirk House looks south to Pendle, so the Pendle View lawn and the patio are in sun from late morning through the afternoon and the hill catches the warm light at the end of the day. For an afternoon ceremony on the lawn the sun is high and to your right, so we angle you so faces are lit without squinting and the hill still sits behind. The Conservatory is glass-roofed and even, and is our go-to for portraits if it is raining or if the sun outside is harsh. The Gallery is stone and beams with warm bulbs, so we bring flash and bounce it off the beams to keep the colour honest. The Ballroom’s skylight does the daytime work for us, and after dark we put a mono light up for the first dance. Sunset is to the west, over the woodland, and the best of it lands on the front of the house and on Pendle, so we nip out for ten minutes then. The sycamore is the night-time spot: it is down a gravel path with no electricity, so we light it with what we carry. Two cameras each, flash, one stand light and a brolly in the car.

Drone

Stirk House is clear for the drone. There is no flight restriction zone within 40 km: Leeds Bradford is about 41 km to the east and Warton about 45 km to the west. The picture is the manor house in its 22 acres with Pendle Hill behind and the valley opening up towards Clitheroe. We launch from the lawn well away from the hotel guests and stay off the A59 side, and we let the weddings team know in the morning. Adding the drone to your photography is £149.