A Loch Lomond summer wedding on the bonnie banks

a lochside hotel, a Chris Isaak first dance, and 130 people in linen.

Rachel and Tom married at a lochside hotel on the banks of Loch Lomond on a July afternoon so still that the water barely moved, giving their 130 guests — most of them in linen, several of them visibly relieved to be out of the city heat — an almost mirror-flat loch as a backdrop for the whole day.

'We wanted somewhere that felt like a proper Scottish summer,' Rachel says, 'not a garden party pretending to be somewhere in the Cotswolds.' a lochside hotel delivered exactly that: a grand baronial exterior, gardens rolling down to the water, and enough space to let 130 people spread out across the lawns during the champagne reception without ever feeling crowded.

Getting ready on the loch

The morning began with Rachel and her five bridesmaids getting ready in a suite overlooking the water, windows thrown open to let in the smell of cut grass and the occasional distant put-put of a boat engine. Tom, meanwhile, was down at the boathouse with his groomsmen, all six of them in matching navy kilts with a muted Lamont tartan, trying and largely failing to skim stones without getting their kilts wet.

The ceremony itself took place in the walled garden, humanist celebrant Fiona Blair leading a service that leaned heavily on the couple's own writing rather than tradition, including a handfasting using tartan ribbon chosen by both families to represent Rachel's Perthshire roots and Tom's Argyll ones.

The first dance that surprised everyone

Nobody expected the first dance to be Chris Isaak's 'Wicked Game', least of all Tom's mother, who had been quietly hoping for something 'a bit more romantic, a bit less moody'. But the slow, atmospheric track suited the room — low evening light coming through the tall windows, the loch turning pink outside — and by the second verse half the room had stopped watching and started swaying themselves.

'We didn't want a big soppy ballad,' Tom explains. 'That song's the one we always put on driving up to the loch together. It felt right to bring it inside.'

Feeding 130 people well

Dinner was a set menu built around Scottish produce: Loch Fyne langoustines to start, Perthshire lamb for the main, and a cranachan trifle that the catering team had clearly made more than a few times before — light, boozy, properly balanced between oats, cream and raspberries.

As the sun finally dropped behind the hills after 10pm — one of the quiet joys of a Scottish summer wedding — the ceilidh band took over and Strip the Willow cleared what was left of the dance floor decorum. Rachel's grandmother, well into her eighties, was still going at midnight. 'That's the bit everyone talks about now,' Rachel says. 'Not the venue, not the dress. Gran, dancing.'

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