Tickwood was originally leased from Hampden Powlett in the time of Queen Elizabeth I and it passed to the Littlehales family. To the front of the house is the so-called Audience Meadow where a conference is said to have been held between Charles I and his supporters in 1642.

The house, though, is more recent since Tickwood was built, or largely rebuilt, by the Rev. Dr Townshend Forester (1772–1861), Rector of Broseley and Prebendary of Worcester, who was a younger brother of Cecil Forester, 1st Lord Forester (1767–1828), of Willey Park. He made a number of land acquisitions in the Wyke area – between Much Wenlock and Buildwas – in the years up to 1820, and by 1828 had built the present house at Tickwood. Originally the house was a two-storey, three-bay building, but this was extended in the mid nineteenth century and then a service wing was added in the twentieth century. Tickwood now comprises a main block with an awkward four-bay entrance front below a hipped slate roof. A single-storey portico of Grinshill stone, supported by pairs of Ionic columns, stands before the front door. The order of the columns is of an unusual type, with volutes applied directly to a collared shaft. This distinctive form is frequently used by the architect Thomas Harrison of Chester (1744–1829), suggesting perhaps his hand in the design of the house. Townshend Forester’s mother had been of a family that inherited estates at Christleton near Chester – Harrison’s domicile – and Townshend’s brother, Cecil, commissioned the architect to produce unexecuted designs for a grand Doric gateway, adorned with the Forester armorials, that was intended for Willey Park.

Dr Forester conveyed Tickwood to his nephew, J.G.W. Weld-Forester, 2nd Baron Forester (1801–1874), in 1839 and it was thereafter tenanted. From 1846, the house was home to the writer and hymnologist W.W. Hull (1794–1873). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tickwood was home to Lt-Col Herman Wayne, son of the late Rev. W.H. Wayne – a former Vicar of Much Wenlock and Willey, whose first wife was a Rouse-Boughton, and who lived at Tickwood for thirty years. In 1906, Tickwood was occupied by Gerald G.P. Heywood and, by 1935, it was the home of Captain Eric H. Villiers who, prior to 1941, had purchased the property from the Forester family.