Ashford Carbonell has three capital mansions – Ashford Hall, Ashford Court, and Ashford Manor – which were each possessed of a sizeable landed property.

Ashford Court

This was an eighteenth-century creation, built for Samuel Yate Sprott (1761–1802) who chose to build anew, replacing the old Court House (now known as Brook House), which he sold. Sprott had added the Sprott surname of his grandfather – Thomas Sprott of The Marsh, Much Wenlock. His great-grandfather Richard Yate of Roughton, near Worfield, had come into the estate at Ashford through his marriage, in 1684, to Elizabeth, daughter of John Higginson. She, in turn, had inherited the property from her first husband, Humphrey Penn (d. 1681). Humphrey Penn’s father John Penn of the Hurst had acquired the estate by purchase from the Folliot family in 1614.

Samuel Yate Sprott’s father had died when he was just eleven years old, in 1772, and the long minority no doubt enabled funds to accrue for the building of a new house. Built of brick, of two storeys and five bays beneath a hipped roof, the house occupies a site in its own small park to the west of the village. In 1801 Samuel married Lucy, the daughter of John Oakley of Fir Grove, now Lydham Manor (q.v.), but died the following year. His widow, who remarried to Robert Bell Price in 1807, continued to live in the house until her death in 1811, when the Court and 152 acres were sold.

The property was thereafter acquired by Charles Walker (1773–1847), a London barrister of Yorkshire descent, who probably added the single-storey portico, composed of two pairs of Tuscan columns supporting an entablature, and who also acquired additional land totalling about 370 acres in Ashford Bowdler. At his death, he was succeeded by his widow, the former Bridget Christian Curwen (1788–1859) of Workington, Cumberland, followed by their younger son Charles Frederick Walker (1824–1880).

After Mrs Walker’s death, Ashford Court was let from 1860, although the trustees continued to develop the estate, building new farmhouses following the sale of property that the family owned in Yorkshire. The tenant of the wider estate was Francis Wood Pritchard (1814–1888) of The Grove at Ashford; although he was still living locally, he had given up much of the land by 1881 when the estate was sold.