“I proposed while she held a panting dog under one arm.”

The muddy love story of Rachel and David.

At Muddy Matches, we have inspired many a rural wedding with brides arriving on horseback, by tractor and even in the back of a knackered old trailer hauled by a Land Rover – but leaving the reception on a quad bike? That’s a new one on us.

Step forward the freshly married Rachel and David, who have tied the knot at their local village church in mid Devon, having met whilst online dating with Muddy Matches in 2021.

A farmer’s daughter, Rachel had grown up mending fences and chasing runaway sheep, admitting she never imagined herself the blushing bride type – so it panned out with the muddiest of endings.

David had been much the same – ‘cautious with the whole online dating thing at first’ but smitten from the moment they met and she beat him at skittles in a local pub. “I knew she was special when she turned up for our first date in wellies,” he confessed. “No nonsense, no pretence. Just pure Rachel.”

The reception was held in the big barn at Rachel’s family farm, the tables adorned with hedgerow flowers, mismatched vintage crockery and plenty of cider.

Yet it was the last knockings of the night that brought the muddiest of touches with the bride and groom opting to leave the venue, not in a classic car or horse-drawn carriage as is tradition, but on the back of a mud splattered quad bike, with Rachel hiking up the layers of lace and tuille to swing a leg over the seat behind her husband.

It was the grandest of exits – and, as Rachel puts it, “It wasn’t your typical wedding getaway.” It had been her idea; however, it summed up their relationship, not least David’s effort at a marriage proposal in the first place.

David explains he’d ‘never been one for grand romantic gestures’ but he wanted the proposal to be memorable.

“I had this idea of it being just the two of us, sat in the boot of my Land Rover, watching the sunset,” David admits. “But then Bran, Rachel’s cocker spaniel, ran off after a rabbit, and she legged it after him, across a field. So, instead of a sunset proposal, I got down on one knee while she was stood there holding a panting dog under one arm.”

David still stands by his approach. “I figured, if she’s happy to say yes while knee-deep in mud, chasing after a dog, then we’re definitely meant to be.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Who will you unearth?
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