Enveloped in its picturesque landscape park outside the village of Hopton Wafers, Hopton Court is, in many senses, a monument to industry. Within its gently undulating parkland, with sylvan clumps and the odd specimen tree, the lofty pedimented and stuccoed house stands perched upon its terrace, looking down upon a lake, and appears the epitome of calm rural assurance.

The cast iron conservatory on the lawn to the south-east of the house, which was restored as part of an English Heritage partnership-funded project, gives a clue to the house’s Georgian fortune. Iron was quite literally at the core of Hopton’s existence in the early years of the nineteenth century when the estate was owned by the Botfield family of ironmasters, whose descendants continue to be custodians of the property.

Thomas Botfield (1736–1801) had established the family fortune with the Lightmoor Ironworks, iron and coal mining interests at Old Park, in the Clee Hills, and with satellite mines in Staffordshire and in Flintshire. At Old Park, the Botfield ironworks was, by 1806, the largest in Shropshire and the second largest in Britain.

Of Thomas’s three sons, Beriah inherited Norton in Northamptonshire, William acquired Decker Hill (q.v.), whilst Thomas (1762–1843) came to Hopton, which he purchased for £18,350 in 1804.

Industry and agriculture had rubbed shoulders at the rural estate before the arrival of the Botfields. Blade mills had existed there in the early eighteenth century when the property was owned by the Hydes, a family who had been settled at Hopton since the time of Richard Hyde (d. 1604). The blade mill was later converted to a paper mill and was the unhappy scene of the accidental death of Mrs Sarah Hyde who, accompanying her husband Richard to view the works, tragically fell into the machinery. A spinster daughter, Mary Hyde, sold the property to Joseph Oldham, a Nottinghamshire-born hop merchant from Bewdley. Oldham, who also owned the manor of Caynham (q.v.), in 1770, demolished the existing house at Hopton and built a new house on a higher site which, in turn, was sold to John Hale of Bewdley in 1779. Just four years later, he was succeeded by his nephew, Curteis Hale, and it was Curteis who, in 1798, agreed a sale of Hopton on to Thomas Botfield.