An Aberdeenshire farm wedding in high summer
Hay bales, hog roast, and the family collie down the aisle.
By 6pm the hay bales that had been stacked as seating that morning were catching the low gold light of an Aberdeenshire evening in July, and Robbie and Eilidh's family collie, Nessie, had already made two unscheduled appearances in wedding photographs, once trotting straight up the aisle mid-ceremony with a stick.
Nobody minded. This was always going to be a working farm wedding, hosted on the arable and livestock farm that Robbie's family had run for four generations near Insch, and a certain amount of chaos was priced in from the start.
A wedding on a working farm
The couple married in the same yard where Robbie's grandfather once judged the farm's tractors, transformed for the day with bunting strung between the grain store and the old stone steading. Guests parked in a cordoned-off stubble field and were shuttled up by trailer, a detail that became one of the most talked-about parts of the day.
- Ceremony held in a cleared barn, dressed with bunting and fairy lights strung from the beams
- Guest seating: hay bales covered with tartan blankets for the ceremony, trestle tables for the meal
- Transport: trailer shuttle from the car park field, driven by Robbie's uncle
- Catering: a hog roast supplied by a neighbouring farm, alongside home-grown vegetables from the farm's own plot
- Dessert: a cheese tower made from Aberdeenshire farmhouse cheeses instead of a traditional cake
The practicalities of a farm setting
Farm weddings look effortless in photographs but take real planning to pull off safely and comfortably. Robbie and Eilidh brought in matting for the main walkways to protect heels and wheelchairs from the yard's uneven surface, hired extra lighting for the walk between barn and marquee once the sun went down around 10pm at that time of year, and arranged a generator with a backup unit after a neighbour's wedding the previous summer had lost power mid-speech.
Midges were the other consideration nobody warns you about enough - July evenings in Aberdeenshire can bring them out in force near livestock and standing water, so the couple had citronella candles and midge repellent placed on every table as a matter of course.
Hay bales, a hog roast, and a very determined collie
The reception ran to the rhythm of the farm rather than a wedding planner's timetable - the hog roast, tended by a neighbour who'd been roasting pigs at local events for twenty years, filled the yard with smoke and smell from mid-afternoon, and guests grazed on it steadily rather than sitting down to a formal service. Nessie the collie, meanwhile, had clearly decided the wedding was primarily being held for her benefit, and features in no fewer than fourteen of the couple's final wedding photographs.
A ceilidh followed in the big barn once darkness fell, with a five-piece band from Huntly playing until 1am and a caller who had the farm's least confident dancers reeling competently within twenty minutes.
Budgeting for a farm wedding
Because so much was sourced from the farm itself or from neighbouring farms and family favours, Robbie and Eilidh's wedding for 130 guests came in at around £19,000, considerably under what an equivalent countryside hotel wedding would have cost in Aberdeenshire in 2026, where venue hire alone can reach £8,000 to £12,000. The trade-off was a huge amount of family labour in the weeks beforehand - clearing the barn, building the bar from pallets, painting the trailer.
Eilidh says the effort was entirely worth it for a wedding that felt unmistakably theirs, on land that has been in Robbie's family for over a century. Asked what she'd change, she laughs and says only that she'd have trained the dog better - though really, she adds, she wouldn't change a single hair of her.