Most barns hand you a pair of main speakers next to the stage and leave you to throw the sound down the room. Old Gore doesn’t. The venue runs its own Funktion-One rig built as eight small satellite speakers spread around the walls, all aimed in towards the middle of the floor, with the sub hidden in a wooden box near the centre of the room. There’s no front-of-house stack as such. It means you mix the night differently here - more goes through the system than we’d normally push, more snare and top end fed out so the energy reaches the people at the back as cleanly as it hits the couple on the dancefloor.
Old Gore Barn at a glance
Old Gore Barn sits at Fosse Cross on the A429 just north of Cirencester, part of the Cripps & Co collection - the same family of Cotswold barns as Cripps Barn and Stone Barn, both of which we play. It’s a fire-and-feasting venue: an open kitchen with a proper pizza oven and an Argentinian asado grill at the heart of the catering, a fully stocked bar, and a late licence to midnight. Civil ceremonies are licensed for up to 150 in the barn or out in the woodland glade, with the wedding breakfast seating the same number. There are no bedrooms on site - the venue pairs with two nearby pubs, The Stump and The New Inn, ten and fifteen minutes away, for the wedding party to stay over. Postcode for the sat-nav is GL54 4BZ (what3words: shout.regrowth.same).
Setting up at Old Gore Barn
Band access isn’t the main entrance. The goods entrance sits slightly further along, directly opposite the Gloucestershire Fosse Cross household recycling centre - if you’ve reached the tip you’ve gone the right distance. The crew van comes in there for a flat carry to the stage. The unusual part of the load-in here is the PA: at most weddings we bring and fly our own system, but Old Gore’s distributed Funktion-One rig is good enough and built into the room, so we mix the band through the house system rather than stacking our own. Our engineer comes anyway and runs the desk - the speakers being scattered round the walls rather than fired down the room from one end changes the whole approach, so it’s not a plug-in-and-go house mix. We bring our own lighting and run in-ear monitors throughout, never floor wedges, which keeps the stage quiet and lets the engineer control what the room actually hears - more important here than usual, because the system also feeds the adjacent bar. Guests who slope off for a drink still get the band piped through, and they tend to drift straight back to the floor rather than settling in the next room.
Recommended band size at Old Gore Barn
This is a 150-guest room, intimate by barn standards, and with the venue’s own PA carrying the sound there’s no need to over-scale the lineup to fill the space. The 5-piece Brotherhood - vocals, guitar, bass, drums and keys - is the natural fit, and keys earns its place in a distributed system like this where the mix wants warmth spread evenly rather than a wall of guitar at one end. A 6-piece adding a second vocalist or sax lifts the bigger evening crowds without crowding the stage. We’d rarely push past that here; the room rewards a tight, well-mixed band over a large one.
How a wedding day flows at Old Gore Barn
Couples marry either inside the barn or out in the woodland glade, then drinks and the asado-and-pizza feasting carry the afternoon while the room is turned around for the evening. We set up and line-check during that window so the floor is ready the moment dinner clears. Our usual wedding shape is a chilled first set of around 30 minutes with the first dance and any formal dances landed inside it, then two 50-minute dancefloor sets blended together in our own style, with DJ playlists filling the gaps. Live music runs to the midnight licence. The Cripps & Co team here are genuinely good to work with - relaxed, friendly, and quick to sort whatever the day throws up - so the run order tends to hold without anyone chasing it.
What we know that helps your day
The bar feed is the detail couples don’t expect to matter and then love on the night - because the band carries through to where the drinks are, the room never empties out the way it can at a venue where stepping out means stepping away from the music. The thing worth flagging is the lighting at the end. Once the night winds down the barn is only softly lit, which is lovely to be in but no help at all when there’s a stage to break down and a van to load in the dark. We keep one bank of our own lights running through the packdown for exactly that reason, and it’s worth knowing if you’re coordinating other suppliers clearing at the same time. The other practical point is beds: with no rooms on site, block-booking The Stump and The New Inn early matters more here than at a venue where guests can stay put - the nearer rooms go first on a summer weekend.
The Brotherhood are South Wales’ premier wedding band, playing weddings across Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds. Check our availability for your date at Old Gore Barn.
