She Wanted a Targaryen Wedding. So They Eloped in Northern Ireland Instead.

Lana and Anthony didn’t want a wedding. They wanted a secret Targaryen ceremony, the kind you only see in Game of Thrones, where two people make a vow quietly, in a place that means something, with no one performing for a crowd.

So that’s what they did.

A bride and groom walking in the Dark Hedges aka Kings Road from Game of Thrones. The bride is styled as Khaleesi.

They flew from New York to the Causeway Coast of Northern Ireland, styled Lana as Khaleesi, and spent a day and a half shooting across some of the most dramatic Game of Thrones filming locations in the world. Fourteen months later, they threw a 130-person wedding in New York that cost $80,000.

She says she’d choose the elopement every single time.

The Idea

It started with a single scene. In Game of Thrones, Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark marry secretly in a forest, quietly, without spectacle. Lana and Anthony had already been thinking about skipping the traditional wedding. That scene made it click.

But Lana didn’t want a cheesy medieval theme. She wanted authenticity: an actual filming location, actual landscape, an actual sense of place the show had captured rather than imitated.

Northern Ireland was the obvious choice. It has more filming locations than anywhere else in the production: the land beyond the Wall, Pyke, Storm’s End, the surroundings of Winterfell. More than that, the landscape holds up entirely on its own terms. It doesn’t need the show to make it dramatic. The coastline is genuinely wild. The castles are genuinely ruined. The light is genuinely strange.

The show was the starting point. The place itself kept them.

Why They Chose Two Days

Most couples book a single elopement day. Lana and Anthony chose the two-day elopement experience, and Lana is clear about why that mattered.

“It felt more like an adventure than a wedding day,” she told me. The extra time meant more locations, a different pace, and the ability to capture conditions you simply can’t plan into a single afternoon.

On the second morning, they were at the Dark Hedges before sunrise.

From my side, there are two reasons I always shoot the Dark Hedges at that hour. The first is light. The road runs east to west, which means at sunrise the light floods directly through the canopy of beech trees. It’s one of the most visually stunning things I’ve ever pointed a camera at, and it only looks that way for a narrow window in the morning. The second reason is crowds. By 9am, the Dark Hedges is flooded with Game of Thrones fans and tour buses that can drop 50 to 100 people at a time. After that, it’s effectively unshootable for portraits.

Being there at sunrise meant Lana and Anthony had it entirely to themselves.

“The shots we got in the morning at the Dark Hedges are my favourites,” Lana said. “The light was perfect at that hour. We wouldn’t have been able to capture that on the elopement day since we began in the later afternoon for the ceremony.”

That’s the thing about a two-day elopement that’s hard to explain in advance. It’s not simply twice as many photos. It’s a different quality of experience, unhurried, with no agenda beyond being present in the places you’re in.

What Day Two Actually Feels Like

Day two is my favourite day to shoot, and it’s not close.

By that point, the ceremony is done, the vows have been said, and every box that felt important has been ticked. It’s human nature to carry some tension into the ceremony day, no matter how relaxed a couple is. There’s still something significant happening. Once it’s over, something releases.

On day two, couples aren’t performing. They’re just there, in extraordinary places, with nothing required of them. They notice things differently. They enjoy the locations rather than moving through them. The camera becomes background noise.

Lana had hired a hair stylist for the ceremony day. On day two she let it go. “I felt too lazy to do my hair and makeup quite as much,” she said. That ease, that willingness to just be in it, shows in the images.

a bride styled as Khaleesi from Game of Thrones sat writing her wedding vows.

The Timeline: What Two Days Actually Looked Like

Most couples want to know what a two-day elopement actually is, not just how it feels, but what it looks like hour by hour. Here’s how Lana and Anthony’s days ran.

Day One — July 30th, 2022

11.00am – Brunch. Lazy morning followed by brunch with their 2 guests.

3.00pm – Getting ready. Hair stylist & make up artist arrive at the airbnb to get Lana “Khaleesi ready”.

5:00pm — Prep shots. Hair, dress, vow writing. The quiet before everything begins.

6:00pm — Drive to Cushendun. South along the Causeway Coast, through some of the most dramatic coastal scenery in Northern Ireland.

6:30pm — Cushendun Caves — First Look and portraits. Ancient sea caves carved into the cliffs, vast and dark inside, with waves audible beyond the entrance. A filming location for Game of Thrones and the place where Lana felt Westeros click into place around her. This was where she and Anthony saw each other for the first time that evening.

7:30pm — Drive to Dunseverick Castle.

8:15pm — Dunseverick Castle — Ceremony and portraits. One of the oldest castle sites in Ireland, sitting on a headland above the North Atlantic. The ceremony happened here, with the green valley falling away below them and the ocean beyond. It rained. The photos are extraordinary.

10:00pm — The pub in Portrush. Because no elopement on the Causeway Coast is complete without one.

10:30pm — Coverage ends.

Day Two — July 31st, 2022

5:30am — The Dark Hedges. A 5:30am start. Worth every minute.

6:15am — Drive to the clifftop path.

6:35am — Hamilton’s Seat, clifftop path. One of the most sweeping views on the entire coast, with the Atlantic stretching out below. At this hour in late July, the light is soft and low and completely different from anything you’d get in the afternoon. Lana and Anthony had it to themselves.

7:30am — Coverage ends.

That’s a day and a half that covers more emotional and visual ground than most full wedding days manage. The ceremony, the ancient caves, the clifftop at dawn, the oldest castle in Ireland, and a pub in between.

A bride & groom having their first look in the Game of Thrones caves in Cushendun, Northern Ireland. The bride is styled as Khaleesi

The Locations

Cushendun Caves gave Lana the Westeros moment she had been chasing. The cave is far larger than it appears on screen, and standing inside it, with the sound of waves crashing outside, the darkness closing in, and the scale of ancient rock above her, the shift happened.

“The darkness of the cave and the sound of the crashing waves around me immediately put me into Westeros,” she said. “I was in awe thinking about how long the cave had been there.”

The ceremony took place at Dunseverick Castle, on the headland above a sweeping green valley that runs down to the ocean. On the day, it rained.

The Dark Hedges, the ancient beech tree avenue used in Game of Thrones as the Kingsroad, was the location that stayed with Lana most, even after everything else. “There is something so sacred, old, and magical about walking through a corridor of giant trees,” she said. If she could go back to one place, it would be this one.

Rain, Reality, and Why It Didn’t Matter

Think about any romantic scene in the rain from a film you’ve watched. It’s never light drizzle. It’s always heavy, tangible, visible. That’s because rain you can actually see does something in a photograph that clear skies simply can’t. It adds atmosphere, movement, and texture. On the Causeway Coast, with dark cliffs and grey ocean behind you, rain is practically a creative collaborator. I’ve written more about how I handle rain during an Ireland elopement if you want the full picture.

That said, ceremonies are the one part of an elopement day we can’t simply pause and pivot on a whim. Everything else is flexible. If conditions change, we move. A ceremony is a sacred moment, and interrupting it isn’t the same as choosing a different beach.

Which is why I talk through the rain plan with every couple beforehand. Most want to continue regardless. Some prefer to have clear umbrellas on hand. Occasionally a bride would rather pause and let a heavy shower pass. Every preference is valid, and knowing it in advance means there’s no decision to make in the moment.

More often than not, it doesn’t come to that, because I’m tracking the minute-by-minute forecast and we make the call before the ceremony begins. If a heavy downpour is coming, we’ll move to somewhere naturally sheltered, like the sea arch near Elephant Rock at Ballintoy, and continue there. This is Ireland, so I can’t promise perfect weather to anyone. What I can promise is a plan B that’s ready before we need it.

Lana had worried about the rain affecting her hair and makeup. What she got instead were photos with exactly the dark, moody atmosphere she’d been chasing since she first imagined a Targaryen elopement.

“It felt like a dark fairytale in the best way.”

The Moment at the Vows

She was cold and nervous, shivering slightly as they stood to say their vows on the clifftop, the castle ruin to her left, the valley falling away below.

Then, from somewhere in the field beneath them, a sheep made itself heard.

Loudly.

“Anthony and I started laughing, and it instantly calmed our nerves and brought us back into our bodies,” Lana said. That laughter, unexpected, ridiculous, completely Northern Ireland, did what nothing planned could have done. It brought her back into the moment.

She paused. Looked around. Her husband in a three-piece suit. Her best friends beside her. The green valley dropping away below. The rain on the ocean. The crumbling castle wall.

“It felt like a dark fairytale in the best way.”

What It’s Like When One Person Handles Everything

Lana describes herself as type A. She went into the planning process ready to manage every detail herself.

“It felt like a big relief to finally let someone else take the reins,” she said. “Rob was confident, calm, and organised throughout the whole process. I could tell right away that I could trust him.”

What she noticed most was the absence of drama. When it started raining during the ceremony, I put a cover on the camera and kept shooting. I’d picked up the flowers that morning so there was nothing for them to think about. No frantic calls between vendors, no last-minute decisions landing on the couple.

“There was never any drama. It was a smooth, chill, special day.”

That’s what the photographer-planner model is actually for. Not just convenience, though it is more convenient. It’s a completely different texture of day. When a couple has nothing to coordinate, they’re actually present for what they’re doing.

Elopement vs. $80,000 Wedding

Fourteen months after eloping in Northern Ireland, Lana and Anthony held a 130-person wedding in New York. Their families wanted the celebration, so they did it. All in, it cost around $80,000, with Lana and Anthony covering more than half themselves.

For context on the other side of that comparison: Lana estimates their entire Northern Ireland elopement trip, flights, hotels, car rental, food, shopping, and two weeks of honeymoon travel, came to around $18,000. For two people. Including an international vacation.

She’s not bitter about the wedding. But she is unequivocal.

“I can tell you that there is no doubt in my mind that if I had to pick between the two experiences, I would pick eloping every single time.”

The difference is simple. The New York wedding was for other people. The elopement was for them. “Anthony and I had an entire day and a half just about us and our love.”

And then there’s what happened after. People she had never met were talking about the photos, friends of friends, passing through family connections, four years later and still asking about them. A big wedding reaches the people in the room. An elopement on the Causeway Coast, photographed well, travels further than that.

What July Actually Looks Like on the Causeway Coast

Lana and Anthony eloped on July 30th, the height of summer by the calendar. The day was dark, overcast, and rainy.

That’s Ireland, and it’s worth being honest about it before you book.

July on the Causeway Coast gives you long evenings. Sunset isn’t until after 9pm, which means a generous shooting window and the kind of soft, drawn-out light that makes evening portraits extraordinary when the sky cooperates. It also gives you the best chance of warmth, which matters when you’re standing on a clifftop in a wedding dress.

What it doesn’t guarantee is sunshine. Even in peak summer, the Causeway Coast does what it wants. The day Lana and Anthony got married was grey and wet, not what most people picture when they think “July wedding.”

It also produced some of the most atmospheric elopement images I’ve ever taken.

The dark sky, the rain on the ocean, the mist over the valley below Dunseverick, all of it gave the photos exactly the cinematic quality they’d been hoping for when they first imagined a Targaryen elopement. A bright blue sky would have told a completely different story, and honestly, a less interesting one.

If you’re planning a July elopement in Northern Ireland, come prepared for any weather and trust that whatever the day brings will work in the photographs. That’s not a consolation. It’s genuinely how it goes. I’ve written more about how I approach rain on an Ireland elopement day if you want the full picture.

“I Hope to One Day Do a Vow Renewal with Rob at Dunseverick”

That’s how Lana ended her answers. Unprompted. She’s already thinking about a vow renewal at Dunseverick Castle, the same headland where they said their vows.

It tells you everything about what this kind of elopement can be. Not just a day, but something that stays with you. Something you want to return to.

If you’re a couple sitting with the question of whether to do something like this instead of a traditional wedding, Lana’s story is one of the clearest answers I’ve come across, from someone who has genuinely done both.

She chose both. She’d choose this one every time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can American couples legally elope in Northern Ireland? Yes. American couples can legally marry in Northern Ireland, and I handle the paperwork and legal requirements as part of the planning process. You’ll need to give notice of marriage in advance, and I walk every couple through exactly what’s needed so nothing gets missed. You can read more about the full process on my Northern Ireland elopements page.

Which Game of Thrones filming locations can you get married at in Northern Ireland? Several of the most iconic locations are available for elopements. Cushendun Caves, the Dark Hedges, Ballintoy Harbour, and the clifftops near Dunseverick and Kinbane all featured in the show and are locations I shoot at regularly. Each one is genuinely dramatic in person. The show didn’t need to do much to make them look cinematic. I can build a full two-day itinerary around GOT locations if that’s the vision.

How much does a Northern Ireland elopement cost compared to a traditional wedding? Lana and Anthony are a real example. Their entire Northern Ireland trip, including flights from New York, two weeks of hotels, car rental, food, shopping, and the full two-day elopement package, came to around $18,000. Their New York wedding, held fourteen months later, cost $80,000. A destination elopement in Ireland typically costs a fraction of what couples spend on a large wedding at home, and you come back with photographs from one of the most visually extraordinary places in the world. You can find full details on my elopement packages page.

Lana and Anthony’s elopement took place across the Causeway Coast of Northern Ireland, including Cushendun Caves, Dunseverick Castle, the Dark Hedges, and Hamilton’s Seat, several of them filming locations from Game of Thrones. If you’re thinking about a destination elopement in Ireland or Northern Ireland, you can find out more about how I work as an Ireland Elopement Photographer & Planner.

About Rob Dight

Rob Dight is a destination elopement photographer and planner based on the Causeway Coast of Northern Ireland. Over 12 years he has worked with more than 300 couples from across the United States, photographing elopements at some of the most dramatic locations in Ireland and Northern Ireland. His work has been featured by the BBC and recognised by Professional Photo Magazine, which named him one of the top 50 wedding photographers in the UK.

Rob specialises in handling everything, from the legal paperwork to the flowers, so couples arriving from abroad have nothing to think about except being present on their day. He has worked with couples from all 50 US states and has been based on the Causeway Coast long enough to know where the light falls, which locations to avoid at certain times of day, and where to take shelter when the weather changes its mind.

Find out more about working with Rob