Andrew & Rory: tweed, tartan and a country house wedding at home

Two grooms in matching Highland dress on the steps of a Perthshire estate — and the small moment between the ceremony and the speeches that meant the most.

Andrew and Rory got engaged on a Sunday walk with the dog. There were no fireworks — just a question, an answer, and a very confused labrador.

They wanted the wedding to feel the same: understated, warm, and unmistakably them. The venue was never really a decision at all — Rory's family estate in Perthshire had hosted three generations of family gatherings, and the idea of marrying anywhere else quietly fell away within a week of the engagement. What followed was a year of planning that leaned heavily on people they already knew: a cousin who could turn her hand to flowers, an aunt who offered to run the driveway parking, a neighbouring farm that lent trestle tables for the marquee. It was, Andrew says, 'the least corporate wedding either of us had ever been to, and we were the ones getting married at it.'

Two grooms, one Highland dress code

Both grooms wore full Highland dress — matching tweed jackets, hunting tartan kilts, hand-me-down sporrans from Rory's grandfather. 'We didn't want to look identical,' Andrew says. 'We wanted to look like us, together.' The distinction mattered to them: the tartan was shared, chosen for its muted green-and-brown hunting sett rather than a bright dress tartan, but the ties, the waistcoat buttons and even the brogues were deliberately mismatched, a small visual joke that only the two of them and their closest friends clocked on the day. Their legal marriage schedule was collected in person from the local registration office in the weeks before, since Scotland allows couples to marry under civil, religious or belief ceremonies with equal legal standing, and Andrew and Rory chose a celebrant who could weave both grooms' family traditions — one Presbyterian, one entirely secular — into a single ceremony without asking either to soften who they were.

The moment on the steps

The favourite photograph of the day isn't from the ceremony or the ceilidh. It's a quiet moment on the estate's stone steps, foreheads touching, the Perthshire hills behind them. 'Ten seconds,' Rory says. 'That's all we needed.' It happened in the gap between the ceremony ending and the receiving line forming, when a photographer with the good sense to keep shooting caught both grooms alone for the first time since they'd said their vows. Everything else about the day — the piper who led guests from the walled garden to the marquee, the ceilidh band that had every generation on the floor by nine, the whisky bar built from an old horsebox — has faded a little in the retelling. That photograph hasn't.

Advice for a home wedding

Marrying on family land brings its own logistics, and Andrew and Rory are candid about what they'd do differently. Perthshire in late September is glorious but unpredictable, and the marquee sides went up and down three times in the fortnight before the wedding as forecasts changed. They leaned on local tradesmen for generators, portable loos and marquee flooring rather than a single all-in-one wedding supplier, which saved money but meant Rory's mother effectively became an unpaid project manager for six weeks.

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