Colourful & Fun High Paradise Farm Wedding & Cycling Tou

WWW readers Alan and Lucy are joining us with their fun and relaxed High Paradise Farm wedding. Their day was a riot of colour, DIY decorations and a lot of smiles.

They are keen cyclists and I love how they incorporated bikes, not only during their proposal but during the wedding and the honeymoon too. They had a weekend celebration that spanned 3 days, with a pizza party, the wedding day and Sunday morning breakfast with camping for guests on site. How awesome is that?

I was excited to hear the food was both gluten-free and vegan – it looked amazing! Then there were the gorgeous natural blooms, the confetti cannons and beaming sunshine all day long.

Louise Barry Photographer, I can’t thank you enough for sharing with us these joy-filled images of Alan and Lucy’s very special celebration indeed.

High Paradise Farm Wedding

The Proposal

Alan proposed while we were on holiday in Cornwall in July 2021. It was our first holiday in our new campervan that had been custom-built for us and our love of cycling.

On this particular day, we’d done an amazing bike ride around the southern coast of Cornwall before heading to a pub car park to sleep for the night. While we were waiting for a table to be free for dinner in the pub, we walked down to a beach for a small walk.

The beach was deserted. It was a little stormy but incredibly beautiful, and Alan popped the question. Alan cried a lot but did eventually get his words out as he held a ring he’d made from 4 links of a bike chain in front of Lucy.

The Vision

We wanted a relaxed, colourful and fun outdoor wedding.

We were determined to hold it in Yorkshire, while neither of us is from Yorkshire it’s where we met and have since built a life together.

We chose some areas that were really important to us; a personal ceremony, using local Yorkshire suppliers, having a totally vegan and gluten-free menu (our dietary requirements), making sure we had a fun band and very colourful decorations.

We wanted as many people as possible to camp on-site and host the wedding over a few days. We organized a pizza party on the Friday evening at the venue and most people stuck around for breakfast on the Sunday too, meaning that it wasn’t just the one day.

The Venue

High Paradise Farm, Boltby, Thirsk YO7 2HT

We knew the venue already as it’s a Café/Tea Room on a farm that can only be accessed by foot, bike or horse.

When we visited to view as a wedding venue it ticked all of our boxes. It had both outdoor and indoor space, accommodation on site, as well as ample space for camping and an incredible view over the North York Moors. For the wedding package you can hire the whole venue for the weekend, this includes outdoor ceremony area, courtyard for the reception, camping and the rooms.

A huge selling point for the venue was the owner, Ginny, she is a fantastic host that puts you at ease, is professional and knowledgeable about organising weddings but is extremely down to earth and laid back as well.

The Ceremony & Music

We wanted a ceremony that was personal and really told the story of how we met and the life that we’ve built together. We’d already decided to have a celebrant conduct the ceremony but when we met Sophie Colligan we knew she was the one to write and deliver it. This was one of the best decisions we made.

To help Sophie prepare the ceremony we spent the day with her talking through our story and our values as a couple so she could really get to know us. Her style is relaxed, personal and fun, which suited us perfectly.

On the day, Sophie wore a sparkly jacket, delivered our story and had the wedding party laughing throughout most of the ceremony.

Your Photographer & Filmmaker

Louise Barry was the first supplier we booked after we’d settled on a date. Louise was the photographer at 3 of Lucy’s friends’ weddings (all in the same friendship circle) so we knew she was fantastic.

Her style of informal and candid snapshots was exactly the style we were looking for, and she did not disappoint. Louise captured the day perfectly; the fantastic views, the incredible weather, and the natural joy of everybody at the wedding.

The Styling & Decor

The theme of the wedding was colourful, which included all colours rather than a set colour palette.

We wanted as much to be homemade as possible. We bought fabrics of various colours and our family helped us to make the bunting and the table runners beforehand.

We painted the signs ourselves and my step-mum sourced old candlesticks, colourful candlesticks and small vintage jars for the table flowers. Alan’s mum dried flowers from her conservatory for the confetti, Lucy’s uncle designed and made the table names and place settings and Lucy bought the napkins second-hand from Facebook.

The flowers were quite special, they were grown organically on a farm just a few miles from the venue. They made our bouquets, buttonholes and decorated some old bicycle wheels from Lucy’s brother’s bike shop. Other than that, they provided buckets of flowers that were in season and my step-mum put them into small jars on the tables as well as wrapping an archway in flowers.

The day before the wedding, both our families helped us to decorate the venue, which was great fun. Our only rule was that no two colours should go together. When we finished and stepped back, we couldn’t believe what we’d achieved. We had a vague vision of colourful but no set plan beforehand.

It looked incredible and we were so grateful of all the help everybody had given us.

The Honeymoon

The honeymoon was a few weeks after the wedding, which was the best decision as we needed time to recover and reflect! For our honeymoon, we drove our campervan over to the Italian Dolomites where we had a campsite booked for a couple of weeks.

We spent two amazing weeks in the mountains, doing incredible road bike rides, having mountain bike adventures, and doing a couple of beautiful hikes (on our rest days!). On our drive back home, we also stopped off in France to watch the penultimate stage of the Tour de France, which was absolutely incredible.

Memorable Moments

As we wanted the ceremony to be really personal, we asked my 14-year-old cousin, also called Sophie, to write us a poem. We never expected her to come up with what she did! Sophie asked all of our family members, plus our best man and woman, to give her one word that describes Alan and one word to describe Lucy. She used these words to create the poem and delivered it on the day during the ceremony. It was the most beautiful moment of the wedding.

Alan’s brothers had organised a surprise of huge confetti cannons to be delivered to the venue, making sure they were biodegradable paper confetti. They surprised us by setting off the cannons when we walked into the wedding reception area together.

They set it up by having all of our brothers lined up near the entrance (we have 6 brothers between us). When we walked in, the cannons went off and we reacted by laughing, dancing, and twirling around underneath the confetti as it fell. It was one of the most incredible, unplanned moments that had everyone laughing and cheering as they could see the pure joy on our faces.

Advice For Other Couples

Think about what is really important to you both and make sure you focus on those areas. There will be a lot of decisions to make and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by them but keep coming back to what is important to you and how you want your day to look and feel.

This is a test of your relationship, build the wedding as a team and it will set you up well for your marriage.

Try not to focus everything on the one day – all the organising and pre-wedding events are all part of the celebration. That includes taking parents out to buy fabric for decorations, visiting the venue with friends as part of a walk, stag/hen parties etc. It helps take the pressure off the big day and allows you to spread out all the fun across the period from proposal to honeymoon.