Real Wedding – Ellie & Rhys

28th October, 2025

Stunning Cumbrian real wedding album for Ellie and Rhys at the gorgeous Casterton Grange. A truly unique wedding, planned to perfection, featuring an ice cream parlour and pop up tattoo studio! What an incredible way to immortalise your wedding and create a memory that will last forever.

We invited Ellie & Rhys to tell you all about their big day, with the ins and outs of their wedding planning process, to hopefully inspire you with your own special event! Read on as she shares her wedding story with some brilliant tips for those in the throws of wedding planning!

Take it Away Ellie & Rhys!

Hi! We are Rhys & Ellie, and are both from Whitehaven in Cumbria. We both work as electricians, which is where we met 9 years ago while doing our apprenticeships!

We both love going to festivals and gigs together, going on holiday and spending time with our French bulldog Maggie!

We got engaged in May 2022 at the Gilpin hotel in Windermere, in one of their amazing spa suites!

Tipi hire in the lake district and tipi hire in cumbria - giant Hat Tipis set up at cumbrian wedding venue Casterton Grange for unique wedding

What made you decide on an outdoor wedding?

We always knew we wanted an outdoor wedding, and always knew we wanted a tipi! The tipi was the dealbreaker for us, we both decided on that before we found our venue!

We chose a tipi over a marquee just because we felt it suited the vibe of our day a lot more, we attended the showcases that special events had organised where we got to see both the marquee and the tipi’s set up, both were AMAZING but we were sold on the tipis.

How did you find Special Event Tipis & Marquees?

We found special event tipis and marquees on social media, we pretty much started emailing the team as soon as we got engaged.

Why did you choose your venue?

We chose our venue based on where we could have our tipis! We didn’t know where to start really, we went to view a number of venues and had a few boxes we wanted ticked. Because we wanted a whole weekend of celebrations we were looking for somewhere that provided this, somewhere with amazing grounds, and also somewhere with accommodation as we had a lot of family travelling from different parts of the country so wanted somewhere for everyone to stay.

The special event team told us about Casterton Grange Estate in Kirkby Lonsdale as they had done a number of weddings there before, as soon as we went to view it we instantly fell in love!

Job done! Very happy bride and groom following tipi wedding ceremony

Tipi wedding ceremony, tipi hire in the lake district, tipi hire cumbria

Describe your wedding story…

We always knew we wanted a summer wedding, to sort of have a festival vibe & pray that we had good weather for the day! We ended up having our wedding on the summer solstice! We had 112 guests at our wedding, it was important to us to have everyone who we loved celebrating with us!

Our main vibe we wanted was chilled, to match both our personalities! We chose pinks, reds and oranges as our colour scheme, we always knew we wanted bright colours to match the summer season!

We had taken some inspo for theme and styling off Pinterest and sent this over to our amazing florist Olive Owl, who brought our vision to life! She styled our tipis, and created the most AMAZING flower arrangements! We just really wanted bright colours, that was our main theme and inspiration!

For our table plan we knew we wanted vinyl, as we both love listening to music, and collect vinyl ourselves! We decided on our table names based on bands, and artists we have both seen together! We found the amazing Daydreamer Creative Studio on Instagram and she brought this to life for us, it was everything we had hoped for! Our wedding favours were personalised matchboxes, that were just made by ourselves using canva! We also had an audio guestbook from Calleo, which was a vintage pink phone, which we then got all the audio messages printed onto vinyl! We styled that on a vintage telephone table that we found on Facebook marketplace!

We created wedding newspapers as our order of services, again using canva! We thought these would be a lovely keepsake to have, and something a little different!

Our first dance was one of our favourite songs “In your eyes” by Peter Gabriel!

Personalised wedding decorations inside giant hat tipi wedding hire in cumbria and the lake district

Beautiful tipi wedding with tipi hire in cumbria and the lake district at wedding venue casterton grange - beautiful wedding florwers by lake district wedding florist olive owl

Personalised wedding confetti for wedding ceremony and tipi wedding

Personalised wedding decorations inside giant hat tipi wedding hire in cumbria and the lake district with gorgeous wedding florals by Lake District wedding florist Olive Owl

Personalised wedding favours for wedding guests created by the couple

Wedding confetti shot following tipi wedding ceremony

Tipi hire cumbria and the lake district - tipi internal shot with long tables and brightly coloured runners and candles, with beautiful wedding flowers

Olive Owl, Cumbrian wedding florist getting ready for the tipi wedding hire in Lake District, Cumbria

What did everyone wear?

My wedding dress was an Alena Leena dress from the White Closet in Manchester.

The Groom and Groomsmen’s suits were from Moss Bros.

My bridesmaids dresses were all from high street shops, including Next, Boohoo and H&M. I really liked the look of all of the bridesmaids being in different dresses, the most important thing to me for my bridesmaids was that they felt confident and comfortable in what they were wearing!

Groom and groomsmen getting ready in Cumbrian wedding venue Casterton Grange

Dog Friendly wedding, outdoor wedding ceremony with very impawtant pooch, flower girl and flower dog in matching outfits

Checking out the new wedding ring - congratulations

beautiful wedding bridal bouquet from Lake District wedding florist Olive Owl and bride, Ellie's white Doc Martins

How did you feed and water your guests?

We found both our caterers and bar from the special event showcases!

We had Kindred Spirit for our bar and also doing our welcome drink cocktails, the cocktails we chose were classic margarita, strawberry mojito & an aperol spritz. The Kindred Spirits team were absolutely amazing, so accommodating with everything we asked for and all of the staff on the day were so lovely – I couldn’t recommend them enough.

For catering we had Karen Rhodes Catering, who were also so, so accommodating! They let us have full control over our menu and nothing was ever a hassle or too much! We decided on a sharing platter for our starter, pie and chips for main and then chocolate brownie for desert. All of which were gorgeous and everyone complimented the meal!

For evening food we had Fiery Mamas Pizza Van come and serve all the guests pizza, which again were incredible. All of our guests loved the pizza, this was such a perfect choice for us for evening food, it made it so relaxed and everyone could just help themselves!

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Evening wedding caterers with pizza van hire from fiery mama's pizza hire

Delicious wedding catering from the fabulous cumbrian wedding caterer Karen Rhodes Catering, Lake District Wedding Caterer Karen Rhodes Catering

How did you entertain your guests? Did anything fun or unusual happen on your wedding day?

At our drinks reception after the ceremony we had, the amazing Rusty’s Piano Bar singing for us!

We had Megan Bell tattoo artist set up doing tattoos (yes real tattoos) for us and our guests. Megan created a flash sheet of lots of tattoo options for the guests on the day, we couldn’t believe how many guests actually got them! Megan was non stop the full time she was there, we can’t thank her enough they went down so well!

We had Gelato at the drinks reception from the milking parlour Cow To Cone who are in Kirkby Lonsdale! (The best gelato ever) where we picked our own flavours for our guests to choose from, again this went down so well, because who doesn’t love ice cream?

For evening entertainment we had a DJ from Schmooze events, we had made a playlist of songs we wanted played, we were up dancing all night! It was perfect.

Bride and groom with matching tattoos from pop up tattoo parlour. What an incredible way to immortalise your wedding and create a memory that will last forever.

Ice cream van hire in the lake district and cumbria, The Milking Parlour, catering wedding hire in the Lake District, gelato hire for weddings

Evening activities started with dancing inside the tipis

Do you have words of wisdom for our future brides and grooms?

Your wedding day goes SO fast enjoy every minute, take it all in! & all the planning & stress is SO worth it! & don’t stress over the little things, if something goes wrong on the day nobody even notices!

Supplier shout out – who helped to make your day magical?

Everyone who I’ve mentioned already, they helped make our wedding day the best day of our lives and we are so so grateful!

Special mention to Jo Greenfield who was our unbelievably talented photographer! Jo captured our day perfectly, we are absolutely over the moon with our pictures. She helped calm nerves on the day, and is amazing at what she does.

Also special mention to the Casterton Grange team, and especially Holly who helped keep our day running smoothly & helped with anything we asked, nothing was ever too much for Holly, we can’t thank her enough.

And last but certainly not least the special events team! They helped us with so many aspects of the wedding planning, with helping us find our venue, and recommending our suppliers! They were so so helpful and we can’t thank them enough.