Hereford Wedding Venues - Craig Y Nos Castle Wedding Venue
Wedding Planning > Wedding themes by Town
Hereford Wedding Venue ideas, for Weddings near Hereford
Hereford Weddings
Your Hereford Wedding Reception
in a Castle
- it's all yours for your Day
"We only allow one wedding a day in the castle, so
our Castle is exclusively yours for your wedding day"
This sets our castle apart from wedding venues in Herefordshire / South Wales area who may have more than one wedding on same day.
Exclusive Use Hereford Wedding Packages
in a Welsh Castle
- a stunning Wedding Venue nr Hereford
- a stunning Wedding Venue nr Hereford
Visit on one of our
- Time from Hereford to Craig y Nos Castle Wedding Venue: 1 hour 23 minutes
- Distance from Hereford to Craig y Nos Castle Wedding Reception Venue: 58 miles
Award winning Hereford Wedding Venue in South Wales for your big day!
See Suggested
for your Wedding Day
at Craig y Nos Castle, near Herefordshire
See our Hereford Weddings
and Herefordshire Wedding Packages
See our Weekend Wedding Package with 60 to 70 day guests and 50 guests staying overnight.
See our amazing two day full weekend VIP Wedding Offer. As you are a little further away in Hereford staying overnight is a great idea, and why not make a full weekend of it. Have all your guests stay overnight for a full two day two night VIP weekend wedding.
Note that when you have 70 guests stay over for two nights, you reduce what you as a couple pay, for a £28,00 value wedding, down to around £10,300 due to accommodation use by guests booking and paying for their own rooms - read m0re.
See our Last Minute Weddings Offers.
For all our wedding packages, see Wedding Packages Selection for the most suitable wedding package for you.
Why Choose Craig y Nos Castle
near Herefordshire?
All your Herefordshire wedding guests can stay overnight with you on your wedding day. Party late into the night, with no worries about you or your guests getting back home to Hereford.
Craig y Nos Castle wedding venue sleeps up to 81 guests in en-suite doubles and family rooms.
We're probably the only castle wedding venue where all your guests can stay overnight.
A unique Wedding Venue - the romance of a real Welsh Castle combined with the historic grandeur of our very own Opera House licensed for wedding ceremonies.
Craig y Nos Castle only accepts one wedding a day, so you and your guests from Herefordshire will have the run of the whole ground floor of the castle exclusively.
You're not in just one room, you and your guests have the run of all our ground floor rooms:
(1) The opera house for your wedding ceremony, where you will be the star of the show, on stage, before all your guests
(2) Welcome drinks in the Nicoloni Room, our main reception lounge (or outside in gardens if weather is fine)
(3) Your wedding breakfast in our 130 seater conservatory with fabulous views overlooking the Brecon Beacons National Park
(4) Evening wedding party and late night disco in our evening function room and music room, with resident's bar.
Should you 'go local',
for a wedding venue
in or near to Herefordshire,
or can you go further afield
in or near to Herefordshire,
or can you go further afield
for a more special and unique wedding day?
'Local Hereford Venue'
or a South Wales
'Destination Wedding Venue'?
You may have guests some distance away from Hereford, who'll need to travel to your wedding anyway, so it won't matter to them so much where you get married.
For guests who live local to you, friends and neighbours and acquaintances and even work colleagues in and around Hereford, do you want a local wedding venue near Hereford or in Herefordshire where all your guests can get to easily? Or are you all happy about travelling across the border, down via Brecon, to Craig y Nos Castle?
Hereford Wedding Theme ideas
Wedding Decor and Wedding Gift Ideas,
based on Hereford's history, style and culture
Link your wedding theme, wedding decor and wedding favours to the history, style and sense of place in Hereford.
Your wedding theme may be linked to your own past, to key moments in your relationship with each other, your favourite colours, your personal tastes, or you may incorporate elements of your home town of Hereford into your wedding day 'story book'.
When considering wedding decor you may already have plenty of your own ideas for your wedding. Or maybe you are still looking for inspiration?
Reflect the story of Hereford in your decor, to connect your personal history in your home town's roots, and your family's location in Hereford. You may get some ideas from the history of Hereford below, its buildings, street names, or local transport routes etc.
Interesting Facts About Hereford
you could use in your
wedding theme/ decor/ story
1. Hereford is 16 miles from the Welsh Border. Population: 58,900.
2. The town was formally named 'Hereford" by Royal Charter from Richard 1st in 1189, and has been recognised as a City for centuries.
3. The name Hereford derives from the Anglo Saxon "here", meaning an army or formation of soldiers, and "ford", meaning a place for crossing over a stream or a river. So Hereford may be where an army forded the Wye. The Welsh name for Hereford is Henffordd, meaning "old road", in reference to the Roman road and settlement at Stretton Sugwas. It was occupied by the Saxons from the C.7th.
4. Products from Hereford include cider, beer, leather goods, poultry, and the famous Hereford breed of cattle.
5. Hereford Cathedral along with the first bridge across the Wye both date from the early 12th century.
6. Hereford Castle was once similar in size and scale to Windsor Castle and used as a base for repelling Welsh attacks. Warfare between the English and Welsh brought a great deal of business to Hereford. The Welsh under Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwynedd and Powys, with Viking support, burnt the town to the ground in 1056.
7. It is still legal to shoot a Welshman on a Sunday in Hereford, provided it’s with a longbow and within the Cathedral close.
9. Hereford also saw a lot of action in the Civil War, held by the Royalists (it supported the King) and sieged unsuccessfully by the Parliamentarians. However it was taken over by the Parliamentarians by trickery towards the end of the Civil War. Parliamentarian soldiers dressed as labourers to get in and opened the gates to let more soldiers in.
10. In 1974 Herefordshire was merged with Worcestershire to become part of the county of Hereford and Worcester.
11. Hereford makes a lot of cider. Hereford has many acres of orchards, making it cider country. Bulmers, now owned by Heineken, is a Cider producer making Woodpecker Cider, Strongbow and Bulmers Cider. Bulmer’s factory is the largest cider making factory in the world with the world’s largest vats holding 15 million gallons of cider.
13. Hereford has recently had a boost in investment after many years of under-investment. An area of 100 acres north of the city walls is subject to a 15 year £80m regeneration, managed by Hereford Futures. Work started in 2012. The project includes rebuilding the canal basin at the end of the disused Herefordshire and Gloucestershire Canal, a supermarket, a new multiplex cinema, shops, restaurants etc.
14. A further £60m was recently spent building the new Hereford County Hospital.
15. 10,000 new homes are to be built in the Hereford area in the next ten years, and maybe one day, a bypass!
Will you invite
'Evening Only' Guests
or invite everyone for the whole day?
'Evening-only' guests won't travel far. Craig y Nos is more of a 'destination wedding venue', where your closest friends and relatives come to your wedding, and where you invite everyone for the whole day.
When you choose a venue further away from your base, you'll tend to invite everyone for the whole day. Also you'll need somewhere all your guests can stay overnight.
Craig y Nos Castle sleeps over 8o guests. Have most of your guests stay with us. Everyone will party with you late into the night as they have no worries about getting home to Herefordshire.
Unlike with a 'local' wedding reception, when you marry at Craig y Nos, you won't have so many guests shooting off early to get home.
Unlike with a 'local' wedding reception, when you marry at Craig y Nos, you won't have so many guests shooting off early to get home.
With more local weddings nearer to Hereford, a wedding party dwindles around 11-12 as guests leave to go home. Having everyone stay over at Craig y Nos means your party lasts late into the night.
A truly magical and unique
castle wedding venue
Craig y Nos Castle is a popular destination wedding venue for couples all over the UK. It combines the attraction of getting married in a real castle, in your own fairytale castle for either a day or a whole weekend, a historic building (yours exclusively for your wedding) in an area of outstanding natural beauty.
The mountain scenery of the Brecon Beacons National Park guarantees you stunning photo opportunities both inside and outside the castle. The Grade One Listed Opera House makes a fantastic setting for your wedding ceremony. You get exclusive use of the whole ground floor of the castle for you and your Herefordshire wedding guests.
Hosting over 100 weddings a year, Craig y Nos Castle is a truly magical and unique castle wedding venue for Brides and Grooms from Hereford with reasonable and affordable rates.
Ideas for your wedding decorations
and wedding theme based on the history
facts about and facilities and
attractions in Hereford
Hereford is such an interesting an ancient town that there is plenty of material to choose from for your very own location’s storyboard. You just need to choose which feature of Hereford fits in best with your own colour scheme and preferences.
2. The cider connection and apples could make for a very interesting wedding theme.
In the 15 years we have been holding weddings at Craig y Nos Castle, for example, we have twice had an apple themed wedding. Yet given Hereford’s cider industry, this would be a most appropriate design theme.
1. If you have guests both from Wales and from England, you might feature a Medieval theme involving the old wars between England and Wales that were fought in Hereford. This might work for the evening party as a form of light entertainment.
2. The cider connection and apples could make for a very interesting wedding theme.
3. One theme it would be rather unique to incorporate could be based on the Hereford breed. If your guests or relatives are from the farming community, this would be more relevant than the apple theme. Table names could be named after different breeds of cattle, or you could just stick with the Hereford theme and feature table decorations with award winning Herefords.
4. Another idea: if you have a lot of children to your wedding, you could hire a life-size model of a Hereford cow that the children can have fun ‘milking’.
5. Hereford Art Week may provide you with further inspiration for a Hereford themed wedding and for Hereford favours and venue decorations.
6. A copy or poster of the Mappa Mundi, an ancient Medieval Mapp of the world, could feature on a Hereford story board for your family, along with family photos, to provide a sense of place, along with pictures of old Hereford buildings.
7. Table Names could be named after famous places in and around Hereford: The Buttermarket, The Cider Museum, Eastnor Castle, Goodrich Castle, Hampton Court, Hereford Cathedral, Symonds Yat, The Old House, Waterworks Museum, Wye Valley Walk, the Weir etc. This would possibly apply if all your guests came from the Hereford area.
Of all the ideas above, the apple theme may be the safest, as it is tried and tested and you can see some examples of where apples have been used on wedding table decorations before.
More interesting facts
about Hereford
16. Farming is a major part of the economy in Herefordshire with the cattle market in Hereford. Hereford cattle are the oldest of all beef breeds dating back to 1742 and are known for their docile temperament. Herefords are a reddish-brown colour with white on the head, legs, tail, and underbelly. The 2001 Foot & Mouth crisis caused a decline in the cattle market, which has now been moved to outside the city centre. The new Hereford Cattle Market was opened in August 2011 and has been very successful.
17. The annual Three Choirs Festival, dating back to the C.18th, is one of the oldest music festivals in Europe. It is held in Hereford every third year; the other two years the Festival is hosted in Worcester and Gloucester.
18. Herefordshire Art Week is an annual county-wide exhibition held in September, displaying the work of local artists and there are many arts shops in Hereford.
19. The Old House, built in 1621, is a historic black and white house housing a museum about life in the Jacobean.
20. In the spring/summer the International Cider festival features a large display of named cider apples, when the apples are pressed to make Cider in the traditional way.
21. Hereford Cathedral built in 1079 contains the Mappa Mundi, a medieval map of the world dating from the C.13th, restored in the late C.20th.
22. Hereford Cathedral also contains the Chained Library comprising 1, 444 books and 500 manuscripts. The earliest books at the library, the Hereford Gospels, date from 1012-1056.
The library was not always situated in the Cathedral. It was moved to Lady Chapel in 1590 and in 1841 the books were removed and stored in the Vicars Choral Cloister and the cases went to the crypt. In 1897 the books were all moved again. A new two storey building was made and this was called the Dean Leigh Library; the books remained on display to the public here until 1996.
Now in the new library building within the Cathedral the books have been returned to their bookcases which have all been re- assembled in their original form, returning to their original location after a gap of 150 years.
In the 1200's books were worth as much as a house.
The books were chained up up so they could not be taken from the library. They were so heavy they had to be moved around the cathedral by a large wooden book chest with a strong pole attached to the top to enable two men to carry the chest.
23. Holme Lacy House, a hotel, was built in 1500.
24. Places to visit include:
The Black Mountains,
The Buttermarket,
The Cider Museum,
Eastnor Castle,
Goodrich Castle,
Hampton Court - C15th Castle surrounded by 1000 acres of stunning parkland, pasture and woodlands alongside the river Lugg built by Sir Rowland Lenthall in 1427,
Hereford Cider Route,
Hereford Cathedral,
Symonds Yat,
The Old House, Waterworks Museum,
Wye Valley Walk, the Weir.
25. Hereford has the oldest building in England, the Bishop's Palace, which was built in 1204.
26. Hereford was the birthplace of David Garrick, the C.18th actor who breathed life back into London theater, and Nell Gwynne, an actress who was Charles II's mistress.
27. Hereford also benefited from the fact that Saint Ethelbert (murdered in 794) was buried there. People traveled long distances to visit the shrines of saints and they spent money in Hereford.
Ethelbert was the young prince of the East Angles, who travelled to Western England (then Mercia) to marry the daughter of King Offa, only to be murdered on the orders of King Offa. He was later canonised and buried in the Cathedral, which is dedicated to Ethelbert and the Virgin Mary.
28. In the mid 13th century the friars arrived in England. The friars were like monks but instead of withdrawing from the world they went out to preach.
There were 2 denominations in Hereford: Franciscan and Dominican. Franciscan friars were called grey friars because they wore grey robes. Dominican friars were called black friars because they wore black robes.
29. The railway line reached Hereford in 1854; Hereford was the last major town to be connected by rail.
30. In medieval times Cathedral Close was the city Graveyard. It was also used for grazing for Pigs. But the Pigs dug up the human remains so the land was walled off in 1389; the loss of the grazing led to riots.
31. Herefordshire is known as the ‘University of The Great Outdoors’ due to the variety of outdoor pursuits on offer, from kayaking to climbing and mountain boarding to cycling.
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Day | Min No's | Wedding Packages |
Sat Fri | 70 60 | |
Sun- Thu | 50 | |
Wedding Package Selector - check which wedding package best fits | ||
Any day | 50 | |
Sun- Thur | 25 | |
Wed only | 40 | |
Any Day | 100 | |
Any Day | 70 | |
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