The 10 best wedding venues in County Kerry

A marriage solemnised in Ireland is a legal marriage, and non-resident couples follow exactly the same process as Irish ones — there is no separate civil ceremony to repeat in your home country. The requirement is three months' notice given in person at a civil registration office, followed by a second appointment before the date at which you are issued a Marriage Registration Form; that form must reach whoever is conducting the ceremony or it cannot legally go ahead. Where one partner is a non-EU national there is an additional interview stage, so allow extra weeks. Your own country will normally register the Irish certificate rather than ask you to marry again, but confirm that with your embassy before booking flights.

Not with a State registrar. A civil ceremony has to take place in a venue the registrar has approved, and beaches and private gardens are specifically excluded — which rules out the strand ceremony a lot of couples have in mind when they choose Kerry. The way around it is a registered solemniser: humanist celebrants and religious officiants appear on the same register and are not tied to an approved room, which is how the outdoor ceremonies photographed at Kerry estates are legally done. Several venues here, Muckross Park among them, state they are licensed for civil, spiritual and humanist ceremonies, so ask which of the three a particular space actually covers.

Two bookings run in parallel and neither one secures the other. The venue is the one couples worry about — peak Saturdays in Killarney and Kenmare go first, while midweek and off-season dates stay open considerably longer — but the registrar is booked separately through the civil registration service and cannot legally be given less than three months' notice. Hold the date with the venue, then get the notification appointment confirmed before anything is printed or sent, because a date without a registrar is not yet a date.

The range is unusually wide for one county. At the small end, Sheen Falls Lodge sells a two-person elopement and Cahernane House caps dinner at 80 with whole-house hire at that number. The middle is where most Kerry venues sit: the Skellig Suite in Dingle takes up to 220, Ballygarry Estate outside Tralee quotes from 25 to 180 and above, and Muckross Park's Valentia Suite reaches 270. Above that the field thins fast — the Listowel Arms quotes up to 350, and Great Southern Killarney states a ceiling of 800, the largest in Kerry by a distance.