'Love is everywhere here': Why Gretna Green is more than the go-to for eloping teens
21.05.2022 - 12:13
/ msn.com
eloped to the quaint border town in Dumfries and Galloway, to get hitched in speedy ceremonies and in hot pursuit from angry parents. While teenage marriages are rare these days, thanks to its romantic reputation, Gretna Green has become a destination for couples of all ages. It is now known as the UK’s wedding capital with more than 3,000 couples marrying there every year.
It was the chosen venue for Kerry Katona back in 2007, when she married her taxi driver boyfriend Mark Croft on Valentine’s Day in The Mill Forge at Gretna. The area has become a celebrity onscreen in its own right, too. Not only was it the star of Channel 4 show Wedding Town in 2015, but Gretna Green also made an appearance in the final series of Downton Abbey, when Lady Mary considered the location for the Crawley family wedding.
Meanwhile, soap story writers have also kept it a firm teen-wedding favourite, with EastEnders’ Ricky Butcher and Sam Mitchell eloping to Gretna Green in 1991 when Sam was just 16, as did Tiff and Keegan in 2019. Coronation Street’s Nick and Leanne also ran off to Scotland to get married as teenagers in January 1998. Back in the real world, lovebirds Dennis and Marie tell Metro.
co. uk how they first met on a train in 1963 when Marie, now 75, was just 16 and Dennis, now 77, worked steam engines on the railway. Dennis moved into her family home where he shared a room with her brothers.
‘It was all decent. We weren’t living in sin. Her mother wouldn’t allow that,’ he says.
It was Dennis’ idea to elope, so he got packing. ‘I put some odds and ends in a holdall. When it was ready to be zipped up, I went into one bedroom, lowered it through the window on a piece of rope onto a flat roof.