ANRÁN spreads across 30 acres of private countryside at Landscove, a few miles from Ashburton and the southern fringe of Dartmoor, and it is the kind of place that reveals itself slowly. At its heart is a 17th-century farmstead — a restored manor house and a courtyard of barns — but it is what has been made of the land around it that sets the place apart. There are flower and kitchen gardens, orchards and animal paddocks, a lake and a lily pond, an eco-sauna and a hot tub tucked away for the morning after. Very little about it feels like a venue in the conventional sense. It feels like somewhere a family has spent years quietly getting right.
The spaces themselves are genuinely unusual. The Glass House is an orangery in spirit, full of tropical planting and daylight, and it seats up to 220 for the wedding breakfast. The Plant House, ringed by exotic foliage and koi ponds, takes somewhere between 150 and 180 for a blessing or a reception, while the Hay Barns open up for anything looser. Then there is The Hut, which is where the night generally ends up — corrugated metal walls, ornate chandeliers and a slightly subterranean feel that makes it a natural room for dancing. Ceremonies happen beside the lake, at the lily pond, or in the Grade II listed parish church next door, reached along a private walkway through the gardens.
ANRÁN is taken on exclusive dry hire, so the estate is entirely yours and you build the day up from the bare bones. There are 14 luxury ensuite bedrooms across the manor house and the barns, with an optional glamping village of bell tents overlooking the kitchen gardens. Most couples take a long weekend rather than a single day, and since there is no corkage you can bring your own drink and either self-cater or hand the food to the in-house team.
Where the band plays
There are two very different evening rooms here, and it is worth deciding early which one your night belongs to. The Glass House with a couple of hundred people in it is large, bright and hard-surfaced, and it carries sound generously once the tables have been cleared — a bigger line-up has room to breathe. The Hut is the opposite: smaller, darker, closer, and a four- or five-piece playing into that low ceiling will lift the room within a song. Telling your band which space they are in, and roughly how many will be in it, matters more here than at a venue with one obvious hall.
How the evening tends to run
This is the one detail worth pinning down early. Live music here has tended to finish before the party does — sets wrapping up around 9pm or 10pm while the bar and the dancing carried on well beyond — which puts the band on stage sooner than most couples expect, often not long after the speeches. Build the afternoon backwards from that and it works beautifully; let the wedding breakfast drift and you lose the end of the set rather than delay it. Confirm your own live-music finish when you book, and if it falls well short of the end of the night, arrange something to carry the room across the gap.
Bands available in Devon and perfectly at home in a venue like this.
More live music in Devon.
- Devon Wedding Bands
- Events Bands in Devon
- Tribute Acts in Devon
- Devon Wedding DJs
- Corporate Entertainment in Devon
Worth reading before you book: Sound Limiters Explained. More questions answered on our England & Wales FAQs.