Issue 59

FUNCTION VENUES
FRECKLE PHOTOGRAPHY
CASE STUDY
Lower Grenofen
An elopement wedding offering in Dartmoor National Park
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CLARE KINCHIN PHOTOGRAPHY
Leaving big events behind
in favour of more intimate
packages, we talk to Nicola
Evans about making the
switch to becoming an often
imitated but never equalled
specialist in the niche of
elopement weddings.
When did you start your venue business, and
what is its history?
We first thought about opening a wedding
venue on our wedding day in 2012 – not the
best time to discuss a new business venture.
We had looked for venues for our wedding, but
couldn't find what we wanted, so we did some
building work at home and fashioned a space
we could use. On the day, our caterers said,
'Wow, this place is amazing; you should hire it
out,' and so the idea began.
From May to September 2014, we started
with big weddings for up to 120 people, as
we're primarily an outdoor venue. In 2016
we launched elopement weddings in our
closed season. In 2018 we extended these
to the summer months (just one a month),
and in 2019 we launched our midi mid-week
package for up to 20 guests - one a week.
So that year, we did big weddings plus midi
mid-week weddings from May to September
and elopement weddings all year except for
January and February.
When we started the business, I had a
maximum timeline of 10 years. Like other
venues, Covid was a game changer for us. We
re-arranged over 150 weddings, concertinaing
all the postponed weddings into a truncated
period in the summer of 2020 and 2021. Both
those years were full-on in between lockdowns.
In 2021 we held over 60 elopements, a record
for us. During lockdown, we decided to
downscale early when our existing bookings for
big weddings wound down at the end of 2022.
Our first wedding here was a family wedding
– our own. Our final big wedding was last
August for my middle stepdaughter – it felt
very appropriate to end on another family
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