66 - Clungunford House
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2023
Summary
A solid unpretentious Regency squire’s house built for Rev. John Rocke 1825–28, and designed by Edward Haycock I, it bears close stylistic similarities to Haycock’s Ty-glyn Aeron in Dyfed, Coedarhydyglyn, West Glamorgan, and Chyknell (q.v.). Like these other houses, Clungunford is of two storeys of rendered brick, and has broad eaves with exposed rafters. On the west-facing entrance front this gives way to a pair of primitive pediments on the outer projecting bays, and to a canted bay on the garden front. A single storey portico, of two Greek Doric columns set in antis between pilasters and carrying an entablature, marks the front door, below a pair of windows. Inside a top-lit cantilevered staircase rises up at the centre of the house.
The previous house was located on lower ground, closer to the river, and a watercolour of 1802 by William Pearson shows it to have had a central block of three bays and two-and-a-half storeys. A central open portico on the ground floor was embraced by sashes under blind segmental arches, and with lower wings.
Clungunford had been a divided property until 1559 when William Berkeley of Cressage succeeded in buying one moiety from Thomas Stringfellow, having, in the previous year, acquired a first part from John Littleton. The Berkeleys were descended from a second son of one of the Lords Berkeley of Berkeley in Gloucestershire in the fourteenth century, and they remained the owners of the Clungunford estate until 1709. William Berkeley’s two sons, though, married the co-heiresses of Ewdness near Bridgnorth and so the family preferred to live there rather than at Clungunford, until William Barkley (as he spelled the family name) finally sold that estate in May 1698. William is thought to have been the builder of the core of the earlier manor house at Clungunford which, at his death in 1709, passed to his brother-in-law, Edward Morris.
A Montgomery Attorney, Morris was married to Barkley’s youngest sister Martha, and the couple’s daughter, another Martha, married Richard Rocke (1688–1746) in 1715. Martha died just eight months after the couple’s wedding and, on her death, Clungunford passed to the Rocke family.
The Rocke family had had connections with Shrewsbury dating back to the thirteenth century, and in the sixteenth century Anthony Rocke had been a servant of Katherine of Aragon.
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- The Country Houses of Shropshire , pp. 177 - 178Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021