Bassmead is a moated farmstead on the Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire border, a few minutes from St Neots, and it has been restored with an unusually light hand. The moat is the making of it — you cross water to get between parts of the day, the gardens are laid out around it, and peacocks wander the lawns with the serene self-importance of birds who know they are in every photograph. Nothing about it feels newly built, even where it is, and it photographs beautifully in flat English light as well as at golden hour.
The ceremony happens in the Rickety Barn, which is about 300 years old and has the beams, the board floors and the wrought-iron chandeliers to prove it, all of it strung with fairy lights; it takes up to 150 and there is a small nook at the upper level where musicians or a photographer can tuck themselves out of the way. Alternatively you can marry outside beneath the oak frame of the Thatched Bower. Drinks then move to the Moat Barn, a more modern room with its own bar that opens onto the gardens, and dinner is served in the Bridge Barn under a dramatic dark-timbered ceiling with the water and the planting in view through the doors.
It is an exclusive-use venue, so the whole place is yours, and the two reception barns are designed to open into one another and become a single open-plan space for the evening. Catering is done in house and ranges from proper banqueting to feasting boards, barbecue and wood-fired pizza from an outdoor kitchen later on. There are getting-ready suites for both halves of the party — one across the moat from the other, which rather charmingly enforces the not-seeing-each-other rule — and accommodation on site in Dove Cottage for the newlyweds and Appletree Cottage, whose 7 bedrooms take the closest family and the people who would otherwise be first in the taxi queue.
Where the band plays
The evening belongs to the Bridge and Moat Barns once they are opened up. With dinner for up to 150 and evening numbers rising to 200, there is honest room for a full band and a dancefloor without the tables being wrestled out from under people, and the bar sits close enough to the music that nobody drifts off into another room. Timbered barns are naturally generous acoustically, so a five-piece will sound bigger than it is here; a horn section will sound enormous. The little gallery nook in the Rickety Barn is a gift for ceremony music, a harpist or a guitarist floating over proceedings from above.
How the evening runs
The pattern is a familiar and very happy one: vows in the old barn, drinks spilling out onto the grass beside the moat, a long dinner, then the doors between the barns open and the room changes character entirely. Because there are cottages on site, a good number of your party simply walk to bed, which does wonders for the last hour of dancing. Bassmead doesn’t publish a closing time, so it is worth pinning down the finish and whether any sound limit applies at the same time you settle the catering — a five-minute conversation that tells your band exactly how to shape the night.
Bands available in Cambridgeshire and perfectly at home in a venue like this.
More live music in Cambridgeshire.
- Wedding Bands in Cambridgeshire
- Events Bands in Cambridgeshire
- Cambridgeshire Tribute Acts
- Cambridgeshire Wedding DJs
- Cambridgeshire Corporate Entertainment
Worth reading before you book: Sound Limiters Explained. More questions answered on our England & Wales FAQs.