Wedding delayed when owl flew off with rings and fell asleep in church rafters

A church wedding had to be halted halfway through the service because a barn owl that was supposed to deliver the rings to the groom decided he liked it better in the rafters. So instead of swooping in over the heads of the wedding guests, and with the rings still attached to the ribbons around his feet, Darcey the barn owl flew across Holy Cross Church in Sherston, Wiltshire, and soared up to roof. He liked it so much up there that he fell asleep for an hour, and no amount of coaxing and calling would make him come back down and deliver the rings. After halting the service for a few minutes, the vicar, the Rev Chris Bryan, decided to continue with the owl high above him, and the bride and groom used a back-up set of wedding rings.

“It was a lovely idea, and it was supposed to be really stunning – it would have been absolutely superb… if it worked,” said Mr Bryan. “It was a complete surprise to the groom, although the bride was in on it. It was the bride’s mother’s idea. The groom is into falconry as a bit of a hobby and so it was secretly arranged for two falconers to suddenly appear at the moment when the best man hands over the rings. This chap popped up at the front of the church next to us with a gauntlet on, as another chap appeared at the back of the church with a box. The owl appeared, and took a bit of coaxing to take to flight.



“It paused for a little bit, eventually saw the gauntlet, took off but then instead of landing on the arm of the man by us and delivering the rings, it went up over our heads and landed up in the roof space. The idea was it would be amazing and would swoop over the heads of the guests, and they’d all feel the air rushing from its wings, but it didn’t quite work like that. We all had a bit of a laugh about it, and then we tried to get it down, but it didn’t come. In fact it fell asleep. It presumably thought ‘I’m a barn owl, this is like a barn’. We had a plan B. They say never work with animals, so we had a back-up pair of rings.

“After a few minutes, we gave up trying to get it down and carried on. It was actually rather nice when we went up for prayers and the owl was right above us,” he added. The couple, from Oxfordshire, continued with their day on Saturday with the owl snoozing happily on. “The chaps were there for probably an hour, and in the end had to get a long ladder to go up and get it down,” added Mr Bryan. “I thought it would be a really beautiful and interesting thing to do at a wedding. It’s important that people realise that a church wedding doesn’t just come as a package of things you have to do, and there’s no room for creativity. I’m all for including something of the personality and individuality of the couple getting married,” he added.