Sarah & Jo: two brides, one tartan sash and a Highland castle
How a Loch Duich elopement became a full family celebration — and why the second sash mattered more than they expected.
Sarah proposed on a rainy walk in the Pentlands. Jo said yes before she'd finished the sentence — then they went home, made tea, and started a spreadsheet.
That spreadsheet grew into eighteen months of planning, most of it done at the kitchen table with a pot of tea going cold between them. They looked at barns near Stirling, a townhouse in Edinburgh's New Town, even a marquee on Jo's parents' farm in Ayrshire, before a friend sent them a photograph of a Highland castle above Loch Duich and the search was, in Sarah's words, 'over before it started.' Scotland's marriage law made the practicalities simple: as a same-sex couple marrying in a humanist ceremony, they still needed to submit their Marriage Notice (the M10 form) to the local registrar at least 29 days before the wedding, and because their humanist celebrant was registered to solemnise legal marriages in Scotland, there was no need for a separate registry office appointment. That single piece of paperwork, tucked between cake tastings and dress fittings, was the least romantic and most important thing they did all year.
A day built around them, not a template
They kept the day small and unmistakably Scottish: a humanist ceremony by the loch, a piper leading them into dinner, a ceilidh that ran past midnight. Two dads walked the aisles. Two mums cried. Nobody asked which of them was 'the bride.' Eighty guests stood on the grass in the last of the afternoon light, coats on because a Highland October afternoon does not care about your dress code, and watched Sarah in ivory lace and Jo in a clean crepe gown with a Cameron tartan sash tied over her shoulder walk towards each other from opposite ends of the lawn.
'We didn't want a themed wedding,' Jo says. 'We wanted our wedding — and the tartan is part of who I am.' That sash became the detail every guest remembers: not a matching set of tartan for both brides, but one sash worn with intention, tying Jo's family history into a day that was otherwise entirely their own invention. Sarah's side of the ceremony leaned instead on a reading chosen by her grandmother, delivered in the flat, unshowy Fife accent Sarah grew up with — a reminder that Scottish weddings don't need to look identical to feel rooted in the same soil.
What the weather taught them
The forecast the week before was, by both brides' accounts, 'apocalyptic,' and they spent three sleepless nights rewriting a wet-weather plan that in the end they barely needed. Their advice to anyone marrying in the Highlands between September and March: book a venue with a genuine indoor backup, brief your photographer on golden hour rather than a fixed time, and buy the guests' ceilidh energy into the schedule early, because nothing warms up a marquee full of cold hands faster than a Gay Gordons.
- Submit your Marriage Notice at least 29 days before the date, earlier if you're marrying at a peak Highland venue in summer
- Choose a celebrant registered to solemnise marriage in Scotland if you want a humanist or independent ceremony to be legally binding
- Pack a full wet-weather plan for any Highland wedding outside June-August — golden hour can arrive with a squall behind it
- Let one piece of Highland dress or tartan carry the family meaning, rather than dressing everyone identically
A year on, both brides say the thing they'd tell any couple planning a Highland wedding is the same thing: let the landscape do some of the work. The loch, the hills, the changing light — none of it needed styling. It just needed two people willing to stand in it together.