Stableford Hall is essentially a plain, mid-Georgian house of brick, with a principal south-east-facing front of seven bays and two-and-a-half storeys, the outer two bays and central bay projecting slightly. Around the corner, on the north-east front, rises a full height canted bay. The form of the house was tricked up in the later nineteenth century, when a substantial parapet was added to the façades, heavy stone segmental-arched lintels crowned the windows, and a single-storey three-bay balustraded porch with pairs of Tuscan pilasters flanking arched openings was set before the door.

Stableford had come into the possession of the Warter family as a result of the marriage of John Warter to Joan, daughter and heiress of Walter Bullock in the reign of Henry VII. John had also acquired lands at Cruckmeole (see Longden Manor q.v.), which became the principal Warter seat, although a branch of the family continued to own Stableford until the seventeenth century. Then the property appears to have been partitioned by John Warter (d. 1627) – his great-granddaughter Miriam, the wife of Edward Perks, sold her property and his grandson, John Warter, a barrister from Mortlake, Surrey, also sold his portion.

By the early nineteenth century, Stableford had become the seat of the Jasper family who, in addition to their landed interests, also had a flour mill at Bridgnorth which used power from a Trevithick engine to drive its three stones. The Jaspers are said to have been amongst the earliest landowners to have harnessed steam power for threshing, having an engine in circa 1804. The Hall remained the seat of John Jasper in 1851 and he was a notable sportsman who kept a pack of harriers at Stableford. By 1870, though, Stableford had passed to his grandson, Thomas Smith, the son of Frances Jasper (d. 1852), third daughter of John Jasper, and

her husband Captain T. Smith of the 82nd Regiment. It was probably Thomas Smith who was responsible for the Victorian alterations to the exterior of the house which, after his departure, was noted by John Randall as essentially the brick house that had been built by the Jaspers. By the time that Randall wrote of Stableford, though, Smith had moved to Beaumaris and sold Stableford to the Chandos-Pole family.

Longdon, as it survives today, is a tantalising relic of a much larger house – the history of which is very poorly recorded. Of brick, with stone dressings, the present house is but the southern wing of a west-facing E-plan, late sixteenth-century house. Two storeyed and with gabled attics, the house sits on a stone plinth and has two huge chimney breasts which still remain, with diagonal stacks rising above. In spite of a reeded late-Georgian doorcase and a tripartite sashed window of similar date, the house still retains most of its mullioned and transomed windows.

Internally, too, the hall retains panelling contemporary with the exterior, and other fragmentary details such as the surviving top flight of the staircase which has slat balusters and moulded handrail, plaster strapwork and foliage emanating from vases, together with two plaster roundels with signs of the Zodiac in the ceiling of a first floor room. These remnants suggests a high status build and yet the history of the house is extraordinarily sketchy and even the nineteenth-century historians, such as Mrs Stackhouse Acton, failed to notice the house.

Prior to the Dissolution, Longdon-Upon-Tern was owned by the Lilleshall Abbey. It was acquired by Alice Bromley, who swiftly sold it on to James Leveson. James’ grandson, Sir Walter Leveson (1551–1602) sold his Longdon property, in 1589, to John Tayleur, whose family was already leasing the property. Tayleur, who had married Anna, the daughter of David Jenks, their son John, and also his son Creswell Tayleur (d. 1675) were all described as ‘of Longdon’, and so it might have been for John Tayleur senior that the sixteenth-century house was built.

The Tayleurs are said to have sold the majority of their Longdon property to Robert Phillips of Wellington in 1647 – perhaps in connection with their purchase of the now-lost Rodington Hall estate in that same year, from which they ultimately moved to Buntingsdale (q.v.).

Longdon, meanwhile, passed through the Phillips family to a daughter Anne, who, with her husband Henry Barnes, sold the estate in 1781 to the Howard or Hayward family, a London mercantile family with connections in Whitchurch, Shropshire.

By 1851 Longdon was owned by William Howard but occupied by Henry Stormont, the house having presumably been truncated some time before that. In 1906 the house remained the property of the Howard family and was occupied by R.M. Williams.

Essentially an early nineteenth-century brick house with stone dressings, built in 1836 on an earlier site within Cheswardine parish. The previous house appears, from a drawing of 1835, to have been a close studded, timber-framed structure of various dates, with a gabled porch containing an arched entrance.

As it now stands, Ellerton comprises the symmetrical early nineteenth-century entrance front of two storeys, with triple gables, the centre one projecting and having a tripartite tapered, arched headed opening within which is set the front door. The centre window above the door, like the first floor windows on two bays to each side, has a tapered head and pronounced drip mould. To the right hand side of this block is an early twentieth-century extension with twin gables, to match those of the earlier house, and two windows at first floor level. The bricks and stone were so well matched, it is almost imperceptible. Paired windows again occur on the ground floor of the outer gable, whilst the inner one has a pair of French doors that lead out from the large living room that the extension contains.

The earlier house at Ellerton Hall had been owned by the Soudley (or Sowdley), Wedgwood and Eyton families. Lucy Wedgwood (1647–1698), who had married Philip Eyton of Eyton, was the owner in 1672. She was paying Hearth Tax on eight hearths at Ellerton in the same year that she was widowed. Her son, Soudley Eyton (1669–1701), inherited, but on his death the estate passed to his uncle and was then sold to John White of Trentham (later known as John White of Cherrington).

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Ellerton was owned by Joseph Tomkinson (d.1761) who appears to have come into the property through his wife, Mary. The Tomkinson’s daughter Elizabeth (bapt. 1733) married the Edgmond farmer William Taylor, in 1761. Taylor is said to have been descended from the Taylors or Tayleurs of Rodington (q.v.).

Situated in what is still relatively remote country in the lee of Wenlock Edge, the manor of Church Preen was held in 1086 by Helgot, of Roger, Earl of Shrewsbury. Helgot’s descendants as lords of Castle Holgate maintained an over rule until the sixteenth century. However, from before 1163 the manor had been granted to Wenlock Priory and a monastic cell with two or three monks was established. The long and low Church of St John the Baptist, with its simple lancet windows and nave and chancel within the same overall structure, dates from this period. Adjoining the church at right angles on its southern side, and built of the same local stone, stood the principal monastic structure, known as the Prior’s House. This structure survived as the nucleus of the Manor House until its demolition in 1870.

At the Dissolution, in 1534, the Prior of Wenlock handed over Preen to the Crown, and in 1536 it was conveyed to Gyles Covert or Cirrote. Covert’s brother, Richard, who succeeded in 1559, sold Church Preen to Humphrey Dickins of Bobbington, Staffordshire, in 1560. The property then passed by descent through the Dickins family until the mid eighteenth century, and it appears that they were themselves seated at the so-called Prior’s House. Thomas Dickins – Humphry’s great-grandson – was certainly recorded as such, whilst other members of the family were recorded as church wardens of the parish church, several with monuments therein.

In the early eighteenth century, the then scion of the Dickins family, John, son of Thomas Dickins (d. 1710), ran into financial difficulties. Arthur Sparrow, the nineteenth-century squire historian of Preen, relates that in 1709 he owed one Joseph Girder, Serjeant-at-Law, £1,056, however it does not appear that he necessarily squandered his inheritance without an attempt to salvage the estate at Church Preen. An extraordinary prospectus was compiled for John Dickins, dated 1727 and entitled, ‘Leases for Twenty-One Years To be granted of an ESTATE Capable of such Improvements That the Lessees will be thereby entitled to the Gain of Six-Hundred Pounds for the Payment of One’.

No doubt inspired by the scenes of industry, and their supposed returns, at Coalbrookdale, Dickins made exaggerated boasts of the mineral wealth of Church Preen with a view to persuading investors to sink money into the establishment of bar iron furnaces on the estate.

Bicton, to the west of Shrewsbury, was conveniently placed for the London to Holyhead road which divides and also serves as a line of demarcation between two of the capital mansions of this village. These two houses, Bicton Hall and Bicton House, had another architecturally significant neighbour property in the form of The Woodlands which, at one time, was part of the Bicton House property.

Bicton Hall

This is a double-pile, white-rendered building of two storeys and five bays, with the left-hand bay having tripartite windows at both ground and first floors and the front door set in a Greek Revival stone doorcase immediately to the right. Its west front appears early nineteenth century although the building has a much earlier core, whilst the house was formerly of three storeys – the top floor having been removed prior to 1964.

The property was owned by a Shrewsbury family, the Knights, in the sixteenth century, but by the end of the seventeenth century it had passed to Anne and Elizabeth Payne, the spinster daughters of Vincent Payne, a Shrewsbury corvisor. The Misses Payne sold Bicton Hall and its estate to Arthur Tonge of Shrewsbury, in 1694, for £275, and from the Tonges it passed to the Mucklestons.

With the death of John Muckleston, the Bicton estate was inherited by his daughter, Letitia. She was then still a minor and, at the age of eighteen, married Richard Jenkins. Jenkins was already the possessor of Hargrave on the Long Mountain and the Abbey House, in Shrewsbury, which he had inherited from his father, Thomas Jenkins (d. 1730) High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1729.

The Jenkins’ grandson, Richard Jenkins (d. 1797) married Harriet Constance Ravenscroft of Wrexham and appears to have undertaken improvements to the house and estate. Richard and Harriet’s eldest son – a further Richard Jenkins (1785–1853) – succeeded. Married to Helen Spottiswode, daughter of an East India Company servant, he himself had an important career in India. He had joined the Bombay Civil Service at the age of fifteen in 1800 and went on to serve as acting resident at the Court of Dowlur Rao-Scindia 1804–5, before becoming Resident at Nagpore in 1810–1827. From 1832–53 he was a director of the East India Company and, in 1839, he became its Chairman.

Lythwood Hall’s estate, at the time of the building of George Steuart’s mansion in 1785, was very modest indeed – being less than 200 acres. This small freehold estate had, in medieval times been part of a haye within the Long Forest and it formed part of the possessions of Shrewsbury Abbey after 1346.

In 1547, Lythwood was granted to William Paget and, in the same year, was sold to Robert Longe of Condover. It changed hands again and by 1553 was owned by Thomas and Robert Ireland of Shrewsbury. The Lythwood Hall demesne was separated from the main body of the former monastic estate, apparently in the later sixteenth century, since in 1625 it was settled upon Richard, the son of Richard Owen of Whitley (q.v.) and Sarah, the daughter of Thomas Ireland. There is no indication that the Owens lived at Lythwood, and in circa 1658 the property was sold.

Abraham Giles of Shrewsbury had acquired the site of Lythwood Hall, and was living in a house there in 1662. The Giles family remained at Lythwood until 1727, when Ann, widow of Abraham Giles, made the estate over to her cousin, John Travers. Travers let the house at Lythwood Hall and, in 1730, sold the property to Michael Brickdale of Shrewsbury. The Brickdales were an established family of Shrewsbury burgesses and Michael had been Mayor in 1721. Sadly no record has survived to indicate the appearance of the house that Brickdale possessed.

On his death in 1758 – his two sons having predeceased him – Lythwood went to his bachelor nephew, John Freke Brickdale (b. 1765). On his death, Matthew Brickdale then inherited the estate, but being himself seated at Filton, Somerset, he sold the Shropshire property in 1776 to his sister’s husband (and their mutual second cousin), Joshua Blakeway. Blakeway was a Shrewsbury draper who won £20,000 in a lottery and used this to fund the transformation of the property, with the result that Lythwood Hall came to be nicknamed ‘Lottery Hall’. Blakeway’s son, the Rev. John Brickdale Blakeway, was the early nineteenth-century historian and co-author, with Rev. Hugh Owen, of the 1825 History of Shrewsbury.

Joshua Blakeway marked his new acquisition by commissioning the landscape gardener William Emes to produce a design for the grounds around Lythwood Hall.

An imposing, if not elegant, red brick eighteenth-century house, composed of an eight-bay block – half of which is two-storeyed and the other half is three-storeyed. The entrance door, with a canopy upon brackets, sits uneasily at the centre of this, whilst to the right is a nineteenth-century, three-bay, three-storeyed block of equal height. Inside the house, an eighteenth-century dog-leg staircase with turned balusters survives, and climbs up to the attics, whilst the main rooms have carved wooden cornices and some decorative ceiling plasterwork.

The house is said to have originally been built for Richard Jones (d. 1750)7 who had married Hannah Jones. Their own daughter and heiress, Elizabeth, married Lazarus Venables (d. 1813). Venables added significantly to the house and is said to have moved the entrance front to its current position, also moving the course of the road southwards away from the house. The Venables’ son, Lazarus Jones Venables (1772–1856) made further alterations to the house and acquired more land, yet, in doing so, overspent and eventually offered Woodhill for sale in 1852.

The property was finally sold in 1854 to John Lees (d. 1856), a scion of the Lees baronets of Black Rock, Dublin, for £22,000. The Lees family made extensive alterations to the house, circa 1870, to accommodate a new billiard room and dining room, and added a two-storey oriel window onto the right-hand block. At the turn of the twentieth century, the house was the seat of Lees’ son, George John Dumville Lees, President of the Caradoc Field Club, and the billiard room housed his renowned collection of taxidermy. Tragically Dumville Lees, who was Master of the Tanatside Harriers from 1884, died following an accident caused by barbed wire whilst hunting in 1906. In the twentieth century, the house lost the external details of the Victorian alterations and a single-storey Doric portico over the entrance door was also removed. Following the Second World War, Woodhill, with its park of about 100 acres, became part of the Brogyntyn estate and, until its disposal, with 93 acres, in 1971 was the Shropshire residence of Lord Harlech. The house was again offered for sale in 1987.

Yeaton Peverey is a remarkable late nineteenth-century creation of new house, new park and new estate. To compare the Ordnance Survey maps of the house’s site in 1881 and then in 1903 is to see the most extraordinary transformation of enclosed agricultural fields into open parkland and, at their heart, a new mansion. Yeaton is a distinguished mansion, too, being the only complete house to be designed by Sir Aston Webb, an architect who is today best known for the Edwardian façade of Buckingham Palace. Its parklands are also the work of a well-regarded designer, Henry Ernest Milner, in whose 1890 publication, The Art and Practice of Landscape Gardening, they feature prominently.

The Wakeman family were the patrons behind the creation of Yeaton Peverey. They were a Worcestershire family who had initially acquired Shropshire links and estates, at Hinton and Rorrington in the south-west of the county. These properties had come to them as a result of the second marriage of Sir Henry Wakeman, 1st Bt (1753–1831, created a baronet 1828). His wife, Sarah, was the daughter and eventual heiress of Richard Ward Offley of Hinton Hall near Pontesbury. The distinctive Offley surname was thereafter perpetuated by being bestowed as a forename upon a number of family-heads including the first baronet’s grandson who was the builder of Yeaton Peverey. Sir Henry Wakeman was the son of Thomas Wakeman, Mayor of Worcester in 1761, and, having distinguished himself as a member of the Honourable East India Company, he established his family at Perdiswell to the immediate north of Worcester, where George Byfield designed a new classical house for the family in 1787–8.

Sir Henry’s elder son, Offley Penbury Wakeman (1799–1858) succeeded him as second baronet, whilst his younger son, Edward Ward Wakeman (1801–1855), was established at Coton Hall, near Bridgnorth (q.v.). As the nineteenth century progressed, though, so too did the city of Worcester and the amenity value of Perdiswell was considered by the family to be diminishing. It was the second baronet’s son and successor, Sir Offley Wakeman, 3rd Bt (1850–1929), who made the decision to sell Perdiswell, in 1875, and to establish the family in Shropshire on a permanent basis.

Cronkhill is the earliest foray by architect, John Nash, into asymmetrical Italian-inspired building. The beau ideal of the Picturesque country house, its silhouette is an ornament to the landscape and, in turn, the arrangement of its three principal rooms, which rebel against formality by growing organically from the staircase hall, take full advantage of the easterly views offered by its situation.

It is quite distinct from the stern formality of the Palladian building at Attingham that is now the parent house to Cronkhill. It was not built as an independent country house but, by the time of its construction, the property had become a part of the larger Attingham estate and was being built for the agent to the 2nd Lord Berwick, Francis Walford (1779–1856).

The land at Cronkhill had formed a part of the estates of the Mackworth family of Betton Strange (q.v.), having been granted to them by Edward VI in 1552. By the mid eighteenth century, though, their interests had shifted. Thereafter, the focus was initially Buntingsdale (q.v.) but, by the end of the century, the main branch of the Mackworths was seated at Gnoll in South Wales. Cronkhill appears to have formed a part of a group of properties that were acquired by Thomas Hill of Tern (later Attingham), as he developed his estates. The property, situated on a low hill, looking out across the meanders of the River Severn towards the Wrekin, had been a small settlement that was for many years occupied by the Blakeway family and, when the Nash house was built, a close studded, timber-framed, three-bay farmhouse was incorporated into the house as a part of its service wing.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the 2nd Lord Berwick returned from a Grand Tour with his mother and sisters – bringing in his wake a collection of paintings that included a Claude Lorraine – and he sought to improve the Attingham Estate as a worthy setting for his new works of art and for the mansion at the centre. Nash made his first appearance, seemingly as a part of Humphry Repton’s landscaping of the park of Attingham, when he designed a series of picturesque cottages and went on, in 1805–7, to design the new picture gallery at Attingham (q.v.).

Stanley had been a possession of Shrewsbury Abbey and the Abbey’s ownership of lands there either began or continued with a gift of a farmstead in 1252 from Stephen and Julianne de Stanley. After the Dissolution, Stanley passed to the Billingsley family who are believed to have rebuilt their capital mansion house in stone, possibly replacing an earlier timber-framed structure.

During the Civil Wars, Colonel Francis Billingsley of Stanley took the Royalist side and was killed in the siege at Bridgnorth on the 31st March 1646. The house that he left behind appears to have been intended as a U-plan mansion, facing west, built in 1642. By the late eighteenth century, however, only an L-plan structure stood on the site – the southern wing having been either demolished or unbuilt.

The Colonel’s successor and namesake, Francis Billingsley, sold Stanley in 1647 to Francis Huxley of Broseley. In 1730, Mary, the daughter of John and Margaret Huxley, married Edward Jones, son of Edward Jones (1653–1737), one of the Canons of Windsor, and so conveyed the estate into the hands of the Jones family. Jones’ grandfather, Sir Thomas Jones (1614–1692) had been an MP for Shrewsbury, 1660–1677, and enjoyed a successful legal career being, from 1671, Chief Justice of the North Wales Circuit and, from 1683–6, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas.

At Stanley, Edward and Mary Jones appear to have been responsible for rebuilding the stables which, by the late eighteenth century, had gained an eight-bay west-facing front of two storeys, with the centre two bays crowned by a low ogee-headed pediment that was flanked by finials and crowned by a cupola. The highly distinctive ogival pediment – since lost – is suggestive of the architectural hand of perhaps William Hiorne or Thomas Farnolls Pritchard.

The Jones’ son, Thomas (d. 1782), inherited the family properties around Shrewsbury and at Mold, Flintshire, in addition to Stanley. He served as MP for Shrewsbury, was High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1760, and was knighted. He did not marry, though, and so, on his death, Stanley and the other family estates passed to his second cousin, Thomas Tyrwhitt, the eldest son of John Tyrwhitt of Netherclay House in Somerset and his wife Catherine Booth. Catherine’s mother, a former Catherine Jones, was Sir Thomas’s aunt.

This was long the seat of the Atcherley family, during whose tenure the house evolved to be an asymmetrical mansion of three storeys. Mate illustrated the house in 1906 hiding coyly behind a giant cedar tree, its elevations either rendered or limewashed. Its north-facing entrance front had a single-storey colonnade, of four pairs of Tuscan columns supporting an entablature that was flanked by projecting wings. Within this building was apparently a core of the later seventeenth century, the product of a rebuilding by Thomas Atcherley (1609/10–1681) who had married Eleanor, the daughter of Robert Griffiths, Alderman of Shrewsbury in 1642. Thomas’s great-grandfather, Sir Roger Atcherley Kt, had been Lord Mayor of London in 1511. He died in 1521 leaving a son, Richard, who appears to have been the first of the family to be described as ‘of Marton’.

In the nineteenth century, the Atcherleys were the owners of Cymmau in Flintshire and Whatcroft Hall in Cheshire, in addition to Marton. David Jones (1783–1845), Serjeant-at-Law and Attorney General of the Counties of Lancaster and Durham, was the inheritor of the three properties. His father, David Francis Jones was the owner of Cymmau, whilst through his mother, Jane Atcherley, he became the eventual heir of Marton on the death of her brother, Richard in 1834. Through his wife, Ann Margaret, daughter of James Topping of Whatcroft, whom he married in 1817, Jones inherited that Cheshire property and, in 1834, by Royal Licence assumed the name and arms of Atcherley only when he inherited Marton. He and his wife were keen opera lovers and held their own amateur performance of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore at the house, in aid of local charities, in 1878.

In 1888, on David Atcherley’s death, Marton and Cymau, together with the Fridd Estate in Flintshire, passed to his nephew, Francis Robinson Hartland Atcherley (1865–1895), the eldest son of Colonel Francis Topping Atcherley (d. 1874) of the 30th Foot – later 1st Battalion East Lancashire Regiment – and his wife, the former Miss Heward. Frank Atcherley (as he was known) only lived at Marton for two years after inheriting the estate. On his marriage to Esther Hodgson Mills, daughter of John Mills of Northwold, Bowden, two years later, he moved to live at the Stone House, West Felton. Dying, tragically young, at the age of just thirty in 1895, he left a five-year-old daughter, Muriel (b. 1890).

From the reign of Henry II, Betton was the property of the le Strange family and came to bear their name to distinguish it from Betton-in-Hales in North Shropshire. In the late fourteenth century it passed to the co-heiress daughters of Fulk le Strange. Of these, Margaret relinquished her interest, leaving the estates – including Longnor (q.v.) – to be divided between her sisters Johanna, wife of John Carles, and Eleanor, wife of Edward de Acton. One descendant of the two families, Thomas Corbett of Longnor, sold his moiety of the manor of Betton Strange in 1544 to John Mackworth, ancestor of the Mackworth baronets. In the following year, Mackworth was able to buy the other moiety from the other le Strange descendant, William Acton of Aldenham.

As a result of these acquisitions, Betton – or more precisely, Betton Grange and the lands to the east of the settlement – became the seat of the Mackworths, until it was inherited by Bulkeley Mackworth (1653– 1731), son of Thomas Mackworth (1627–1696) and his wife Anne (d. 1666), daughter and heiress of Richard Bulkeley of Buntingsdale. Bulkeley Mackworth came into the Buntingsdale estate (q.v.), through his mother, building the present house there, to which he removed.

The Mackworth family continued to own property at Betton and neighbouring Sutton until the 1770s, when Bulkeley Mackworth’s great-nephew, Sir Herbert Mackworth 1st Bt (1736–1791), sold the family’s lands at Betton, Sutton and Cronkhill to Thomas Hill of Tern, and they became part of what was to become the Attingham estate. Betton Grange remained a part of Attingham until 1921 when it was sold to William Gibbs.

Some land at Betton Strange did not belong to the Mackworths and, in 1585, was conveyed by Edward Betton to Richard Heynes. Heynes was able to make further purchases in 1590 and 1591 to create a small estate which descended in his family.

In 1676 Jonathan Scott (1647–1716), a Shrewsbury draper and Mayor of the town in 1689, purchased the estate from Edward Heynes for £470, and made a further purchase of property at Betton two years later. Tellingly, Scott was styled ‘gentleman’ rather than ‘esquire’ in the first conveyance. Scott was of a family that claimed descent from a younger son of the Scotts of Scotts Hall in Kent, and his great-grandfather, Richard Scott (1544–1628), was the first of the family to settle in Shrewsbury.

Felhampton was, in the eighteenth century, the seat of the Urwick family, a family also associated, since the sixteenth century, with Wistanstow and whose members are commemorated in monuments at Acton Scott Church. Their occupation of the property was under the Cressetts of Cound (q.v.), although when William Urwick died at the age of fifty-six, in 1814, at nearby Affcot House – having formerly lived at Felhampton – his death notice proudly boasted of the family’s 500 year tenure. By 1824, what was being described as ‘Felhampton Hall’ was occupied by Mr Marston and it appears that the Marston family had become possessed of the property by that time; Francis Marston was one of the principal landowners in 1851 although Mrs Thursby of the Cound family is also cited as having land at that time.

From at least 1872 Felhampton was the home of John Hill (1840–1928), his wife Mary Golthorpe and his family. The eldest son of the Rev. John Hill of the Citadel at Hawkstone and his wife Charlotte Kenyon, John Hill followed his father’s keen interest in agriculture and at Felhampton proved himself as a significant breeder of Hereford cattle, developing the Polyanthus and Rarity families. His herd had a bloodline dating back to the eighteenth century and, in fact, included lines from his predecessors, the Urwicks, who had also developed the breed. Hill also attempted to buy as many descendants of Cronkhill herd of Herefords owned by his distant cousin, the 5th Lord Berwick, following their dispersal sale in 1861. The result of this was that almost half of the animals in the Felhampton catalogue of 1884 were descendants of the Cronkhill herd and buyers from the New World paid frequent visits to Felhampton.

With John Hill as sitting tenant, Felhampton Court was offered for sale in 1895 with 478 acres. The property was again on the market in 1942 and 1947 and then, once again, in 1965 when, still with 294 acres of land, it formed a part of the estate of the late R.J. Cordingley.

The house, as it now stands, appears to date from circa 1750–1760 and was presumably built by one of the Urwick family. Of red brick and with five bays and three storeys, it faces the Shrewsbury to Ludlow road behind a thin belt of planting.

Ludstone was one of the Norman manors that were held by Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury, but later passed to the College of St Mary Magdalen in Bridgnorth which farmed it as a monastic grange. In circa 1403, the then Dean of Bridgnorth, Thomas of Tutbury, began to rebuild the house although his works were apparently never completed. This was one of the two manor houses which are said to have stood on the site before the present house was built for John Whitmore in circa 1607. That which existed prior to that was possibly built for the Brooke family, who bought the property in circa 1548 but then sold it in 1557 to concentrate on Madeley Court (q.v.) and their other estates. The Whitmore building, which now exists, has a pair of seemingly contemporary lodges to the east, although they stand on masonry which may be associated with the earlier house.

The rectangular moat of the earlier house also remains, creating a magical setting for the brick building dressed in red sandstone, with its handsome curvilinear shaped gables. Formed from an H-plan, with strong balanced elevations and a broad central recessed, south-facing gable, set with a two-storeyed, curved mullioned and transomed bay, the house is of a highly sophisticated design for Shropshire in the first decade of the seventeenth century.

Arthur Oswald, writing in the mid-twentieth century, surmised that the house might have been by a master mason associated with a house such as Aston Hall, Warwickshire. Meanwhile, recent research by Mark Girouard has highlighted the fact that Whitmore’s elder son had matriculated from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1617 which had recently been completed to designs by William Arnold. Most of his other documented work is centred around the West Country, at Montacute, Somerset, and at Lulworth Castle, Dorset. At both of these houses he used pairs of unusual arched, scallop-headed niches. Although Ludstone has pairs of niches to the sides of the segmental bay, they are of a conventional type. Their placing in this low location, though, is unusual suggesting that the design, rather than detailed execution, may have involved Arnold or someone in his circle.

The entrance into the house is asymmetrically placed in the gabled projection to the left of the curved bay window.

Golding Hall stands handsomely atop its terraced gardens, enjoying panoramic views of the rolling country to the south of Shrewsbury. At first glance, the red brick house with its north-front’s twin gabled wings and recessed centre appears to be all of one date. It is, in fact, the result of several rebuildings, the earliest parts being the centre range and east wing, which retain sandstone cellars and the remains of mullioned windows that appear to be survivors of a late sixteenth-century house of stone. This was probably the house that would have been known to Robert Hennage who acquired this part of the Golding property in 1599, the place having hitherto – from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century – followed the descent of the Acton Burnell manor (q.v.).

Hennage was not a long-term owner and he sold the house and its lands to George Langley (d. 1615) in 1606. Langley, who was the second son of John Langley of The Amies near Broseley, had apparently already been leasing at least a part of the property from 1598. Twice married, he was ultimately succeeded by Edward (1606–1665), his eldest son by his second wife, Anne, daughter of James Jukes of Downton, Upton Magna. Anne, though, had ownership of the property through her widowhood until her death.

Edward Langley married Margaret, daughter of Thomas Atkyns of Little Ryton, and, after succeeding to Golding, he effected a rebuilding of the house. This was as a closestudded and jettied timber-framed house, with a lobby entry and two main rooms with a central chimney stack that continues down into the cellar. The evidence of this house is still to be seen inside the centre range and east wing, where the framing is now exposed in a number of areas, whilst dendro-dating has confirmed a felling date for the timber of 1660.

Edward and Margaret Langley’s eldest son, George (d. 1663), predeceased his father, and so Golding was inherited, at Edward’s death, by their second son, Thomas Langley (1636–1694). Thomas was a Barrister of the Inner Temple and was admitted as a Burgess of Shrewsbury in 1670. He married Catherine, the daughter of Colonel the Hon. Christopher Roper, second son of Viscount Baltinglass, and was responsible for the west wing of the house, which bears a date stone containing his initials and the date 1668 on its southern gable.

In medieval times the home of an eponymous family, Chyknell passed by inheritance through the female line to the Taylor and Farmer families. The present house was a rebuilding of an earlier construction of which the stables, dated 1792, remain. The client was Farmer Taylor who apparently consulted several local architects. A plan and elevation at the house, possibly by Joseph Bromfield, shows a scheme for retaining the old house as service accommodation, with a new six-bay east front of similar pretensions to Bromfield’s Berrington Hall, Shropshire, which contained new reception rooms and a large imperial plan staircase. Another unsigned plan was for a house heavily influenced by Nash’s Cronkhill (q.v.) with a weak trellis colonnade, which – albeit unexecuted – dictated the rustic Italianate style of the present house.

The successful architect was John Hiram Haycock, whose plans are dated 1814, and the resultant house has a colour-washed north-facing entrance front, with low pitched roof, broad eaves and one bay pedimented projections embracing a single-storey Greek Doric colonnade with antefixae on the parapet. This front is a virtual copy of the entrance front of Coedarhydyglyn, West Glamorgan, a house also associated with the Haycocks. As at Coedarhydyglyn, the western-most pedimented bay of Chyknell’s north-facing entrance front – although externally appearing to be of two storeys – is, in fact, three storeys. It forms a part of the mansion’s offices which continue south of this front, concealed behind a single storey detached colonnade of Greek Doric columns, which have a splendidly theatrical effect. Within, Haycock gave the house an iron trellis balustraded, cantilevered stone staircase which rises to the first floor beyond a screen of Ionic columns in the entrance hall.

Farmer Taylor, who was Sheriff in 1815, had married Juliana, daughter of 2nd Lord Waterpark, and their son Henry Cavendish Cavendish, assumed his mother’s surname. It was for Henry Cavendish, in the year after his succession, that Edward Haycock added a lofty dining room to the house in 1858.

Haughton, with its park wall close to the town of Shifnal, was built in the early years of the eighteenth century for the Briggs family whose monuments dating back to the sixteenth century are to be found in St Andrew’s Church, Shifnal.

Oliver Brigges was the first of the family – which originated in Norfolk and later Westmorland – to settle in Shropshire, at Earnstry Park, Tugford, in the mid sixteenth century. The marriage of Oliver’s eldest son, Humphrey, to Anne, the eldest daughter and co-heir of Robert Moreton of Haughton, brought Haughton to the family, and Oliver was buried in St Andrew’s Church on his death in 1596. His monument is a particularly fine alabaster tomb-chest with recumbent figures, which also commemorates his immediate family. Humphrey and Anne’s eldest son, Moreton Briggs, was married to Cryzogon, daughter of Edward Grey of Buildwas Abbey (q.v.), and he was created a baronet in 1641.

The present house at Haughton appears to owe largely to Sir Moreton’s descendant, Sir Humphrey Briggs, 4th Bt (d. 1734), MP for Shropshire and, later, for Wenlock. The main block, of two storeys and seven bays, bears the date 1718 on its southern parapet and was originally of exposed red brick, although now stands white painted. The south front – which is visible from the London to Holyhead road and must surely have been the original entrance front – has shouldered windows, whilst projecting chimney stacks flank each side of the block and a central stack with three shafts rising from the roof adds emphasis to the mansion. On the other side of the house, the north front’s windows have keystones, whilst the central first floor window has a moulded surround and flanking side scrolls; below this is a single storey pedimented Ionic doorcase with bolection moulded frieze. The door leads directly into the house beneath the main staircase, which has three twisted balusters to a tread and rises around three sides of the hall. By the middle of the eighteenth century a straight formal avenue crossed the grounds from east to west, with the grounds formally landscaped, and this was probably effected at the same time as the building of the new house.

Sir Humphrey was succeeded by his younger brother, Sir Hugh Briggs, 5th Bt (d. 1767).

Hodnet remains the home to the descendants of the family that first came to call this their seat at the time of the Norman invasion. These early owners – the de Hodynet, de Hodenet or de Hodnet family – would have known the castle, whose motte and earthworks still survive to the west of the present house. This, now the home of Sir Algernon and Lady Heber- Percy, presides, up on its terrace, above the spectacular gardens that were created by the late Brigadier Algernon George William Heber-Percy.

The de Hodnet heiress, Maude, daughter of Sir William de Hodnet, married Sir William de Ludlow of Stokesay Castle (q.v.) and so carried Hodnet to that family in the fourteenth century. Their great grandson, John de Ludlow, or de Lodelowe, was described as of Hodnet and Stokesay and he served as High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1379.

Two centuries later, John Ludlow’s heiresses, Anne and Alicia, each married a younger son of Sir Henry Vernon (c. 1445–1515) of Tong Castle (q.v.) and of Haddon Hall in Derbyshire – respectively Thomas and Humphrey Vernon. Thomas inherited Stokesay whilst Hodnet passed, in 1498, to Humphrey Vernon (d. 1542) through his marriage to Alicia Ludlow. Their son, John (d. 1591), married Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Richard Devereux, and they produced a well-connected brood; their one daughter, Elizabeth Vernon, married the Earl of Southampton, whilst another, Susan, married Sir Walter Leveson of Lilleshall (q.v.), and son, Robert (1577–1625), eventually succeeded to the estate at Hodnet.

Formerly a possession of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, the manor of Hardwick was acquired at the Dissolution by Walter Leveson of Lilleshall (q.v.) whose descendants owned the property until 1765. By 1579–80, the Hardwick Manor was apparently held as a copyhold by Richard Tyler who was succeeded by his daughter Dorothy, the wife of William Whitcombe. The Whitcombes’ grandson, another William, was styled as ‘of Hardwick’ in 1663, but the place had passed out of the family’s hands by 1726 when Edward Grant sold his interest to Edward Appleyard. Following Appleyard’s death, Hardwick was sold by degree of Chancery in 1740 for £2,300 to Charles Baldwyn of Lincoln’s Inn, who made the purchase in trust for John Powys of Shrewsbury. In 1741, though, the property had passed to the Hills who, in 1765, bought the manor of Hardwick outright from the Leveson family’s representative, Earl Gower.

Hardwick was thereafter occupied by Sir Rowland Hill, 1st Bt (1705–1783), who lived there until his death with his second wife, Mary Pole. Lady Hill married a third husband, Joseph Foster Barham (1729–1789) – a Jamaican plantation owner who established a Moravian mission at his Mesopotamia plantation – and she continued to occupy Hardwick Grange until her death in 1790. The house was, in fact, depicted in the background of Lady Hill’s portrait by John Russell of 1778, suggesting that the property was already settled on her at that time. It appears as a five bay, two storey brick block, with painted stone window surrounds, the centre doorway having a segmental pediment whilst, above, the window seems to have a triangular pediment, with a roof pierced by three dormers. To each side is shown an attached two-storeyed block with Venetian windows on the ground floor. A Moses Griffith watercolour of circa 1790, in the collection at Dudmaston, similarly shows this elevation, the outer wings of which possibly represented additions of the 1770s.

Oakly is a house that is understated in its sophistication; an eminently attractive red brick house with stone dressings that exudes all the comfort of an English country house and yet which, in the detail conferred upon it by Robert Henry Clive and his architect C.R. Cockerell, is an academic and, indeed, archaeological reference work. Architect and patron worked together over a period of time, remodelling an earlier structure with an extraordinary level of care and attention for every detail. The sympathetic relationship between architect and patron was such that, in 1838, Cockerell could reflect:

The present estate at Oakly comprises a joining of the former hunting park of Ludlow Castle together with the lands of the former Benedictine Priory of Bromfield, which stood on the opposite bank of the River Teme from the Park. After the Dissolution, the Priory and its estate was leased in 1541 – and then later purchased in 1563–4 – by Charles Foxe (c. 1516–1590) of Caynham, who served as Sheriff of Shropshire in 1583. He created a house on the site of the former cloister, and the fragmentary ruined remnants of this, a two-storey red sandstone structure with mullioned and transomed windows, still remain attached to the side of St Mary’s Parish Church. Its windows had sunk-chamfered mullions, a sophisticated detail which can also be found in the Sidney apartments at Ludlow Castle. The building’s life as a mansion was apparently short, since it was burned in the seventeenth century. Happily, the former monastic gatehouse survives in much better condition, its stone lower storey and stout, northerly, arched entry suggestive of a fourteenth-century date and with a timber-framed upper-storey of pre–1600 date.