Eckington Manor sits in the Avon valley at Eckington, a few miles from Pershore and close enough to the Cotswold edge to borrow some of its looks. It is a working farm as well as a place to get married, and that is the whole character of it: the beef and lamb come off the land, the kitchen has built a serious local reputation, and there is a cookery school on site that draws people from well outside Worcestershire. The farm buildings have been converted with obvious care, original beams and flagstones kept where they were found and married to reclaimed slate, oak floors, limestone and hand-painted wallpaper.
Weddings happen in the Grain Barn, whose best feature is the Sun Room — a glass extension that looks out across the fields towards the Malvern Hills and fills the whole space with light. Next door, the Apple Store makes a relaxed bar and somewhere to escape to between courses. Both the Sun Room and the Grain Barn are licensed for civil ceremonies, so you can marry, eat and dance within a few steps, and the terrace and gardens take over whenever the weather allows.
The bedrooms are spread across four converted farm buildings — Lower End House, the Cyder Mill, the Grain Barn and the Milking Parlour — which means your guests stay in something with character rather than a corridor of identical doors. This is a venue for a wedding of 70 or so at the tables and 100 in the evening: intimate by design, with food at the centre of it, and the sort of day where everybody actually gets talked to.
Where the band plays
The Grain Barn is a warm, contained room, and a smaller room asks for a slightly different kind of band. A three or four-piece with a good singer will fill it beautifully and can play with a bit of light and shade, where an eight-piece soul outfit would simply overwhelm the space. Acoustic and jazz line-ups suit the Sun Room for the drinks hour especially well, with the glass and the view doing most of the scene-setting for you.
How the evening runs
Evening receptions here run through to midnight, which gives a band two proper sets after dinner and still leaves a quiet half-hour at the end for the last drink and the walk back across the yard to bed. Because the barn and the bedrooms share a site, the night tends to peter out gently rather than stopping dead at the sound of taxis. Worth confirming at the viewing how the room is turned around between dinner and dancing, and where the band can park and load in.
Bands available in Worcestershire and perfectly at home in a venue like this.
More live music in Worcestershire.
- Worcestershire Wedding Bands
- Worcestershire Events Bands
- Tribute Acts in Worcestershire
- Wedding DJs in Worcestershire
- Corporate Entertainment in Worcestershire
Worth reading before you book: Sound Limiters Explained. More questions answered on our England & Wales FAQs.