St Audries Park is a Victorian Gothic manor house in 100 acres of deer park, tucked in between the Quantock Hills and the Somerset coast at West Quantoxhead. You arrive along a winding wooded drive, and then the house appears, all turrets and stone tracery, with the parkland running out below it towards the Bristol Channel. The deer really do wander about in front of it. It is the kind of arrival that has guests reaching for their phones before they have finished parking.
The day is built around a run of very good rooms. Vows are usually exchanged in the Victorian Orangery, a glass room full of light with greenery pressing in on every side; dinner is served in the Banqueting Hall, which is high and bright and easy to dress; and the Great Hall takes over for the evening. A couple of bars and several reception rooms give everyone somewhere to spill into, and there is a medieval church close by for couples who would rather have a church service.
Accommodation is the venue’s real trump card. Bedrooms are spread across the main house, the Coach House, Windsor House, the walled garden and a scattering of estate cottages, between them sleeping more than 100 guests. Williton Lodge is set aside for one half of the wedding party the evening before, the honeymoon suite has a four-poster and a spa bath, and the estate becomes yours from midday on the wedding day itself. Catering is done in-house, and the kitchen has a good name for it.
Where the band plays
The Great Hall is the evening room and the natural home for a band: a proper hall, with the height and the hard surfaces that live music likes. The Orangery is a different matter altogether — beautiful, but essentially a glass box, which means a great deal of reflection and almost nothing to absorb it, so it is far better suited to a string quartet or an acoustic duo during the ceremony than to a full band later on. A Gothic house is a sequence of rooms rather than one big space, so where the band sets up effectively decides where the party is. Worth deciding deliberately with the venue rather than working it out on the afternoon.
How the evening runs
Evenings at St Audries generally run to midnight, when the bars close and the music stops, though an extension to 1am can be arranged in advance if you want the night to keep going. Some weddings here finish an hour earlier, at 11pm, so it is worth pinning your own time down rather than assuming. Because so many guests are sleeping on the estate, nobody starts drifting off at half ten in search of a taxi, and the last set plays to a full room — which is precisely what makes an exclusive-use venue with beds worth the money.
Getting there
West Somerset is a genuine drive. Taunton is close enough, but Bristol, Bath and everything east of them are further away than the map flatters, and this stretch of coast falls outside the comfortable range of plenty of acts. None of that is a problem, but it does reward booking early rather than late, and it is worth building a little slack into the band’s arrival time.
Bands available in Somerset and perfectly at home in a venue like this.
More live music in Somerset.
- Somerset Wedding Bands
- Events Bands in Somerset
- Tribute Acts in Somerset
- Somerset Wedding DJs
- Corporate Entertainment in Somerset
Worth reading before you book: Sound Limiters Explained. More questions answered on our England & Wales FAQs.