We’d like to preface this review by saying that this venue is beautiful, particularly the orchard, where we held our wedding ceremony. If this review was just for the physical venue itself, it would be 5 stars and a huge thank you to the owners of Rye Hill Farm for allowing us to celebrate our special day on their land in May 2025. We did meet the owners briefly and they were lovely and helpful.

However, until Rye Hill Barn is under new management that is not Karen, we’d seriously recommend that you look elsewhere. If we’d known about Karen’s lack of professionalism before booking this venue for our wedding day, we would have used a different venue. Karen’s communication skills are very poor and absent at times, which caused a lot of stress in what is already a hectic period of planning. We have heard from another couple that used the venue that they experienced similar communication problems with Karen. On many occasions we awaited reply from Karen for weeks at a time, and in one instance she didn’t respond in 6 months. She claimed she didn’t receive our communications. However, we find this untruthful as when it comes to the matter of money, she has responded within hours.

In the weeks prior to the day, we contacted Karen to arrange an in person meeting to confirm final details. We thought a venue manager would be keen to do this to ensure they knew what was happening on the day. Instead, Karen offered us a very last-minute appointment, which we unfortunately couldn’t attend. When we tried to rearrange 3 weeks before the wedding day, Karen told us with just 1 day’s notice that she would be away for 2 weeks and be unavailable. However, during this “time off”, Karen did find the time to advertise to us accommodation for hire at additional cost the week before our wedding day. We felt that it was all too convenient that Karen could find the time to try and get more money from us.

We hired the venue from the Friday 12pm to Sunday 12pm, giving us time to set up Friday and clean up Sunday. We were disappointed with the state the barn had been left in before our arrival on the Friday. We found that the venue was unclean and we had to clean the premises before setting up. There were even insects crawling out of the carpet! It took a team of five of our relatives 2 hours to clean up before we could set up decorations.

Unfortunately, we also had issues with the drinks/bar arrangement on the day. It was agreed with Karen that on the day itself we could provide welcome drinks to guests and drinks for the wedding breakfast. At no point during the wedding planning or prior to the event did Karen communicate to us any instruction on a drink limit, or a time cut-off for our drinks before we were to use the bar on site. We hired a fridge from an external supplier, which we placed next to our guest’s tables for convenience for the dinner.

However, to our shock, whilst eating our desserts, we saw Karen emptying the fridge in front of our guests! She made a scene and claimed that we breached the contract and threatened to unplug the fridge and lock it. We were very upset watching Karen cause this scene on our day and in front of our guests, one of whom even had to intervene to stop Karen removing the drinks whilst we were still sat down. We didn’t expect that we’d have to sit and check our contract, whilst eating our dessert, to ensure we hadn’t done anything wrong! We hoped that if any issues such as this would have arisen on the day, Karen would’ve spoken to us directly, but this wasn’t the case.

Though we still enjoyed our day, we found that our experience with the manager of this venue was not positive and caused a great deal more stress throughout our wedding planning and on our wedding day than we had expected.

We wouldn’t use this venue again, or recommend it to our friends and family, unless it was under new management. We felt very let down by some aspects of Karen’s behaviour on our wedding day and we’re sorry to admit that these have stuck in our memory.