Some places earn their meaning slowly. April and Robin had been returning to Clachtoll for years — it was here, at Clachtoll campsite, that they had spent their very first holiday together as a couple, and they had kept coming back ever since. By the time they decided to get married, the place was already woven into their story.
That matters. This was not a couple who had found a beautiful Highland location on a venue list and chosen it for its scenery. Clachtoll was already part of their life together. When it came to deciding where to get married, the answer was already there.
Their wedding at the Salmon Bothy at Clachtoll Bay was also a celebration of love later in life — and a conscious decision to make their day not just an intimate gathering of close family and friends, but something that drew in a wider circle of people who mattered to them.
Planning began the way it perhaps could only begin with a couple like April and Robin: during one of their regular visits to Clachtoll, a year before the wedding. We met there, made some early plans, and then kept in touch across the following twelve months through emails and calls, the ceremony slowly taking shape. There was a final meeting in the days before the wedding, when we could sit together again and put the last touches to everything.
Various local friends were already busy with preparations — and the excitement was palpable long before April and Robin themselves arrived.
The morning of the ceremony kept us all on our toes. Highland weather does what it wants, and for a while that morning it was uncertain. But the afternoon came through dry, and once the ceremony began, none of that mattered. It never does. What filled the space was the couple's own joy.
At the heart of the ceremony was a handfasting ritual — a tradition with deep roots in this part of the world — and promises to each other that were honest, caring and genuinely funny. Family and friends gathered around them, along with two alpacas. After the formal parts of the ceremony were complete, everyone moved inside the characterful Salmon Bothy, where April and Robin drank together from the quaich before the first toast was raised to them as a newly married couple.
One of those weddings I will always remember as something genuinely special. A place they had returned to, again and again, became the place where they began something new together.
