Photographer Penny McKinley-Rodgers told me about Amanda & David’s Stonehenge handfasting wedding when I met her a few weeks ago. Quite apart from the location, one of the main things that really made me fall in love with this wedding was that the couple got married at 8am and had an actual wedding breakfast – pancakes and all! I am so excited to share this one with you today because Amanda & David really did do things their own way, making them perfect for Rock n Roll Bride!
“Our wedding was incredibly informal but was honestly the nicest most relaxed and meaningful wedding” the bride told me. “We also only invited 20 people, who were all our nearest and dearest and that made it utterly special. We both wish we could bottle the day and go back and live it again whenever we wanted as it finished too soon.”
“Stonehenge was our wedding venue. We had been visiting it (in the normal way) in the first year we’d been going out (2009) and had commented that it would be the best place ever to get married – if you could. Then, looking it up in the car park on our phone, we discovered that you actually could do a handfasting there – which pretty much sorted out that decision well in advance. The theory being that if you got married at Stonehenge, the universe was pretty much likely to pay attention and the ceremony was definitely likely to work in full. We wrote out own handfasting ceremony to make it really personal. Our wedding breakfast was at Fairlawn House Hotel in Amesbury, who were incredibly helpful and lovely. Their cellar venue was decorated with fairy lights and they put out all our tablecloths and vases of flowers for us.”
“The wooden swords are martial arts training swords, but were bought off eBay to stand in for metal ones. The reason is that it is an old anglo-saxon tradition where the groom hands over his ancestral sword to the bride so she can use it to protect her new assets, herself and any children they have; in return she gives him either a new blade or her ancestral blade so he can protect himself and them. The antique sabre was a gift from David’s best man, and a really nice inclusion as this provided a proper sword even though neither of us have ancestral swords (although we do now!). The keys were bought on eBay and are symbolic of the sharing of property and possessions, and by giving them to me it symbolised that nothing was hidden any more and that everything that was his is now open to me. I also see it as symbolic of me becoming head of our new family and household”
Hello and welcome to my little blog. My name is Kat Williams aka the Rock n Roll Bride and my aim is to provide a little haven of kick ass weddingness in a cookie cutter, pastel and often puke-worthy wedding world. If you’ve ever picked up a bridal magazine and felt queasy or trawled the internet and felt disheartened by what you didn’t find well, my friend, you are in the right place!
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