Stone, timber, and the whole Carse of Gowrie below you.
Guardswell Farm sits on a south-facing hillside in the Sidlaws, between Abernyte and Kinnaird, and looks out along the River Tay, over to the north of Fife and down across the Carse of Gowrie. The family who run it have been on this hill since 2011, restoring the old steading and building a scatter of huts and houses around it, and they keep a few weekends each year aside for weddings. I married a couple here in August 2025, at one o'clock on a Saturday.
An old steading, not a hotel
What you're hiring here is the steading and the hill. The farm lists its spaces as the Cattle Court, the Granary, the Bull Pen and the Workshop, with a covered lean-to outside, a farm bar, a bright kitchen, and an infinity lawn with a firepit. Chairs, tables and benches come with it, and the farm quotes room for 150 guests in the day plus another 50 in the evening. It calls itself a blank canvas, and it means it: you bring the caterer, the flowers and the plan.
What stays with me is the texture of the place. Rough stone walls under pitched timber roofs, a wood stove sitting on a long stack of split logs, a whole wall of hanging ferns behind the drinks table, and windows that frame the fields falling away towards the Tay. It doesn't need much dressing. It's warm before you've put a single flower in it.
What I'd plan for
A blank-canvas venue needs one person who owns the timings, so decide early whether that's a planner, your caterer or a very organised friend. Decide early, too, where the ceremony happens and where it moves to if the weather turns, because on a hillside the wind gets a say. I've only seen Guardswell on one August day, so I won't pretend to know every corner: ask to see the Granary and the Cattle Court set out the way you'd use them, and stand where your guests will stand.
Then think about getting everyone there. The farm is honest that it isn't on a bus route: guests come by train to Perth or Dundee and take a taxi, and it's within an hour and a half of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. The huts and houses on site sleep 30, so the rest of your people need beds in town. And it's a working farm, with Hebridean sheep, Shetland cattle and a wildflower meadow in front of the steading, so tell your guests about sensible shoes for the photographs.
One o'clock, and a quaich
The wedding I led here had a quaich at its heart: a drink from each family poured into one two-handled cup and shared. It suits a farm wedding down to the ground. It's Scottish, it's unfussy, and it gives two people from your wedding party a proper moment of their own. If you like the sound of it, my guide to the quaich ceremony explains how it works.
The legal bit, handled
A humanist wedding in Scotland is legally binding, and as a Humanist Society Scotland celebrant I look after every legal word of it: the declarations, the schedule, the witnesses. I write every ceremony from scratch, around your story and nobody else's. I'm based in Glasgow's West End, and I'm a humanist wedding celebrant covering Perthshire too, from the Carse of Gowrie up to Dunkeld. Farm weddings nearly always spill outside at some point, so my practical guide to outdoor humanist weddings is worth ten minutes, and wedding paperwork in Scotland explains the M10 and the schedule.
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More Perthshire, Trossachs and Argyll venues I know inside out: Tay House, Dunkeld · Altskeith Country House · Kilmartin Castle · Kinlochard Village Hall · Fruin Farm · Ross Priory