Abigail + Tim at home in Hexham | June 2025
“thank you so so much 💘💘💘
...had the best day!!”
Abigail and Tim’s wedding day took place in their own shed on their own land. Which was fitting, as young farmers. And when a couple get married in their own house/garden (or farming shed haha!) it makes me excited for them, thinking: you can visit your wedding venue whenever you want. You live here.
I first met the couple when I married their young farmer friends Kate and Liam last year, almost exactly one year before, and so it felt incredibly special to see Kate and Liam arrive as wedding guests….with the teeny week-old baby they’d since had!
Photos by lovely Nicola of The Wild Love Club
Having been together since they were young, the ceremony was full of laughter and stories from their adventures together so far, beginning with a 21st birthday party. Terrible driving, great holidays. Bad skiing, good friends. And we enjoyed two beautiful and unusual wedding readings in the ceremony, read - amusingly - by two same-named sisters-in-law: Emily Charleton.
This poem is Rupi Kaur’s I Do Not Want to Have You:
I do not want to have you
to fill the empty parts of me
I want to be full on my own
I want to be so complete
I could light a whole city
and then
I want to have you
cause the two of us combined
could set it
on fire
And this is Scaffolding by Seamus Heaney:
Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;
Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.
And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.
So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.
I don’t know if you (reading this) know what handfasting is (you might have seen it in the marriage scene in Braveheart); I learnt about the origins (and practice) of handfasting back in the autumn of 2022 when I studied to be a celebrant. It looked fun, maybe a little faffy. Hard to follow where fabric is going in a youtube tutorial, and I’m not great with my left and right. It made me slightly nervous that a couple would want to handfast and I would do the draping all wrong.
But no couple I met since had wanted to make it part of their ceremony…until this June. And then I had two handfastings in a fortnight!
I needn’t have worried on the faffiness factor, it’s a fun one. I loved it. Getting to watch Abigail and Tim literally “tie the knot” in front of their friends and family, and using family tartan that Tim was also sporting in his kilt, was brilliant. I love those moments in a wedding that are visual and fun and symbolic and moving.
Tim and Abigail’s wedding might have been a drizzly June-gloom day, but the vibes in that incredible shed were so cosy and fun. Friends and flowers and laughter in every corrugated corner.
Tim’s friends, groomsmen, were hands-on and helpful (young farmer vibes!); I sent a groomsman running back to my car in the rain to get something I’d forgotten before the ceremony started and I realised after I’d left that I didn’t even get his name. I’m AWFUL. Sending a “young man” to get something from my car makes me sound about 80 years-old but hey-ho, there’s got to be upshots to getting older and I’ll take the help where I can get it if I get to stay warm and dry.
I’d left by the dancing portion of the day, but apparently things got boisterous. The good kind. Abigail had told me in the planning stage, which I relayed to Tim in the ceremony, that one of her favourite things about him is his life-and-soul, climbs-a-marquee-pole, dancefloor presence.
Bet that shed saw some moves.
“so many people said how incredible the ceremony was!!”