A total of 26 couples will tie the knot in Scotland’s marriage mecca today in Dumfries and Galloway.
Falling in love with having a St Valentine’s Day wedding date in Gretna Green and the wider Gretna Parish on St Valentine’s Day is on the rise after more than double the 11 weddings of last year – when February 14 fell on a Wednesday.
It is also three more weddings on ‘the most romantic day of the year’ than in 2023.
Today, 16 will be civil weddings conducted by registrars and 10 are religious ceremonies – all part of a positive upwards climb in Gretna Green’s more than 260-year wedding history, with its runaway brides and anvil marriages heritage.
The Gretna registration district – which also includes Gretna Green and Kirkpatrick Fleming – accounts for 12 per cent of all weddings in Scotland.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the industry was estimated to be worth nearly £37 million a year to the region’s economy and supported 661 jobs – but it was seeing a gradual drop in wedding numbers, with 3,401 in 2019.
And this plummeted to an all time low of 2,500 in 2020.
After the pandemic lockdowns and limitations which hit the marriage mecca hard, the Gretna weddings comeback kick-started in 2022 with 18 couples getting married on St Valentine’s Day that year and 32 couples tied the knot in the there on the “Twosday” palindrome date of 22-02-2022.
Dumfries and Galloway Council’s civil celebrants and registrars also had a busy time during the recent festive season as 135 weddings took place in the region from Christmas Eve to January 2 – mostly in the Gretna Parish.
And throughout last year there were 4,029 weddings in the town – a rise of 20 per cent since 2019 and the fourth year in a row that Gretna has seen more than 4,000 ceremonies.
The most recorded marriages remains at 2004 when 5,555 couples tied the knot.