Confession time: I started looking at wedding venues, like, three months before G proposed. I mean, it was just as well that he’d already started planning a surprise Icelandic birthday/anniversary/proposal trip by then, but yeah, I was ready and armed with a shortlist and had booked up viewings within a week of being back from Iceland. Hashtag eager beaver!

So I’d started looking when I was off sick from work someday last year and G was working from home, and I thought I’d mention how nice a castle wedding would be. G lost pretty much the rest of the day to scouring wedding sites with me. Whoops. But after some quick research we realised that most of these castles would cost a bomb to hire for exclusive use, and having worked a few aimless summers at a golf club, the idea of sharing our day with other wedding parties or, God forbid, golfers, was really unappealing.

I used Hitched for most of my venue research. Can I just say that it really irritates me how most directories feature a selection of whatever it is you’re after, but rarely everything. Like fine, have your paying venues listed in premium positions with more images - having done a bit of temping in the marketing department of Whittlebury Hall I understand how it works - but as a consumer, I want to just go to one website and have all the information I need there.

And there are just so. many. wedding venues in the UK - Hitched alone lists over 4,000 venues - and because our friends and family come from all over the place we were never tied down to a set radius from home, so the possibilities were endless. I stuck with Hitched because I found it to be pretty comprehensive, and the filters were what made the difference for me. In the end I started searching by venue features such as ‘exclusive use’, ‘civil ceremony licence’ and other things that we were interested in, like ‘barn’, then ‘small hotel’ etc., to help me skim past the massive exclusive-use hotels, castles and stately homes that were being pushed towards me.

Eventually we managed to whittle it down to a shortlist of these three venues, all of which were barns:

Dodford Manor, Northampton

Dodford Manor is a collection of beautifully restored stone and new oak barns, and when we turned onto the drive with nothing but rolling fields in view, we were pretty excited. We were about to view our first venue! We received a fabulous and relaxed tour from Simon, a highly knowledgeable member of the team that I could only describe as “a ruddy nice chap”. The ceiling in the ceremony barn is so high and the glass wall lets so much light in that the effect is truly stunning, and as I stood in the private dressing room that peeped into the barn, I could easily picture myself getting ready on the Big Day.

From there we stepped out into the small garden, which is quite plain but beautifully done up with lighting which no doubt looks stunning at night. But the venue isn’t far from the A45, and standing there overlooking the field where your photographer can take you for snaps we could hear the traffic without too much effort, which is something we would prefer to avoid.

The newer reception barn is gorgeous, with enormous sliding doors that keep its impressive insides hidden from guests until the ceremony is done and the doors get thrown open. We stepped inside and admired the view of the fields from the dining area, before dashing into the loos to swoon over the posh toiletries. Walking around, though, we couldn’t help but feel this area would be much too large for the absolute maximum of 70 people we were planning to invite. This was the barn where other families and tours were all milling around, and in the raised bar area we sat down with some drinks to talk meal options.

The most frustrating problem we’ve found with most venues is the lack of flexibility over catering. And while Dodford markets itself as being a relaxed venue with no corkage, there was definitely an air of hard selling when it came to the food and drink, which in itself was a lot higher brow than the atmosphere we want to create. G and I may be amateur food snobs, but we want our wedding day to feel casual and relaxed, right down to the grub - we’re inviting our closest friends and family, why would we want to force them to sit through some stuffy silver service affair?

We had gotten so swept up in how beautiful the venue was and how exciting our first viewing had been, that we provisionally booked our date for summer 2016, which we loved came with a 2-week no-obligation deadline for you to mull over your decision, and began weighing up the pros and cons of Dodford as we readied ourselves for our next viewing.

Cripps Barn, Cirencester

The venue furthest away from us, Cripps Barn, is set much further away from the main road, which immediately gave us a sense of peace and tranquility as we made our approach. We went along to an open day, and when we arrived the entire venue was already rammo with families and couples and done up to the nines with flowers and candles and hurricane lanterns. The indoor ceremony space is an 18th-Century Cotswold stone barn featuring a huge fireplace, beams and flagstone floors - a feature that apparently impressed my wedding photographer step-brother-in-law-to-be (and breathe)!

In my research, I had fallen in love with a number of Cripps’ offerings. Firstly, their caterer is Cripps Kitchen, and they have their own giant rotisserie and an all-weather barbeque on-site. G and I had been to a wedding last year with a South African caterer who served a proper ‘braai‘, which was a stroke of genius - what Brit doesn’t love a good summer BBQ? So our catering requirement had been ticked.

Secondly, they have a stunning garden, and if the weather permits you have the option to get married outside in a glade in the woods. Dreamy. You can also have the garden filled with lanterns and fire pits and all sorts for the evening. The main attraction for me was the bonfire, and for only £50 per bag you can add on sparklers and marshmallows for your guests…bargain!

Unlike Dodford, our tour guide was almost completely useless, but Cripps seems to have done away with a properly trained team of wedding planners in favour of its online login facility, where you can literally add everything you want and need for your Big Day by adding each item to a shopping basket, and you get emails you when you have updates in your login area to take note of. We were initially optimistic about costs from the low hire price, and were horrified when we found out this didn’t include the staffing cost! We cancelled our provisional booking in a right old fit of rage and moped around for weeks, mourning the loss of our dreamy venue.

Stratton Court Barn, Bicester

Stratton Court Barn was the third and last venue we went to see. I’ll keep this short and perhaps not-so-sweet. We went along with quite high hopes for this one - set in Bicester of all places, in a nice and secluded location, the excellently designed website and photography taken at previous weddings all really drew me in. You also have the flexibility to bring in any caterer you want - which, turns out, is because there are minimal facilities on-site.

But also on-site is a bland, concrete car park leading right up to the barn, a cheaply installed bar area, the owner’s house overlooking the venue, their garden which serves as the backdrop for your newlywed photos - which would all have been totally forgivable, had it not been for the rally track fully visible from the dining area. Not an inch of land was left to waste. As we got in the car to leave all G said was “Do I even have to ask?”. Such a shame.

And the winner is

After we had cancelled both Cripps and Dodford, we spent hours and hours researching further venue options (“What if we just book a private room in a really cool restaurant and have a ‘normal’ party?”). After gathering ludicrous quotes from poncey (sorry, I mean “trendy”) London restaurants (“Oh it’s for a wedding reception? Let me add an extra grand for no apparent reason! Congratulations!!”), we worked out that a full day at Cripps would cost around the same amount as Dodford, which was just a bit too mature for us, and less than any town hall ceremony followed by £6,000 for some fingerbowl nibbles and mojitos in some bland London grothole.

And, after revisiting Cripps Barn and looking at how the login area broke everything down, it became apparent how transparent the pricing really was, and we inevitably - but happily - bent our knees to the shocking prices of The Wedding Industry.

So that’s it! How did you choose your venue? Are you still looking? Please feel free to drop me a line at kayleigh@bluejeanswhiteteeblog.com to submit your guest posts for my #YourBigDay subcat and help me to fill the web with lovey dovey smush!