Pentillie Castle

The estate has been in the same family for generations, and it shows in the way the place is run: warm rather than grand, flexible rather than formulaic. Weddings take the castle on exclusive use, a minimum of two nights, so a couple and their party arrive, settle in, and have the run of the house and grounds from the first evening to the morning after. There is no changeover clock, no second wedding in the next field, no sense of being a booking slotted into a diary.

What sets Pentillie apart from the usual castle is the sheer breadth of what a wedding here can be. The historic reception rooms hold up to sixty for the wedding breakfast entirely indoors, no marquee required, which is rare and useful in a Cornish summer. But the lawns take a marquee for up to two hundred when the guest list grows, the gardens take an outdoor ceremony, and at the other end of the scale Pentillie will host just the two of you, eloping in style, or an intimate wedding of twenty-two. One castle, and a wedding that scales from an elopement to a marquee for two hundred.

The ceremony is where Pentillie's inclusiveness becomes concrete. The estate offers a genuine choice of settings and welcomes couples of every faith, culture and orientation: a celebrant-led ceremony under the wisteria, vows at the riverside Bathing Hut down by the Tamar, a chuppah on the lawn, a Nikah, a hand-tying beneath the trees, or a church nearby. Few venues state this as plainly as Pentillie does, and fewer still have the range of real settings to back it up.

Then the celebration, which Pentillie is refreshingly relaxed about. The line the family uses is that there is no prescribed formula, and they mean it: garden games on the Old Tennis Lawn, magicians or caricaturists, sparklers as the sun goes down, a barefoot silent disco or a live band in stilettos. A wedding here can be a demure country-house afternoon or a proper party that runs late, and the estate is set up to take either without anyone having to ask permission.

The food follows the same bespoke logic. Catering is built around the couple, from a traditional fine-dining seated wedding breakfast to a relaxed feast of sharing platters, drawing on the produce of Cornwall and the Tamar valley, served in the historic reception rooms or under the marquee. Drinks flow on the terraces and lawns, and the bar runs as long as the party does, formal or free, exactly as the couple has chosen.

Because there are eleven bedrooms, all with Vi-spring beds and some of the wow-iest views in Cornwall out over the valley, a Pentillie wedding is a stay rather than a day. The whole party moves in for the weekend, with a bridal suite dressed for the morning of the wedding, a farmhouse kitchen for the relaxed hours, a games room, and an outdoor solar-heated pool and sauna to hire. Guests wake in a castle, breakfast together, and leave having lived in the place, not just visited it.

The estate itself does a great deal of the work. Cedar avenues and green woodland paths lead down through the grounds to the Tamar and the little stone Bathing Hut at the water's edge, the gardens rise in terraces to the castle, and the light off the river at the end of a summer day is the sort of thing photographers build a whole album around. It is a landscape that rewards a couple who wants to wander off for half an hour and come back with the pictures of the day.

For a couple who wants a real castle without the coldness of one, a wedding that can be anything from an elopement to a two-hundred-guest marquee, and a family team who quietly take care of everything, Pentillie is close to ideal. It is exclusive use with warmth, a private estate above one of England's loveliest rivers, and a place that hands itself over completely, for a weekend, to one wedding at a time.