Boreatton, in the sixteenth century, was one of the last sections of cultivated land before the bleak northerly onset of moss called Baggy Moor and was then a property of the Onslow family, one of whom – Thomas – was living there in 1595. In 1617, Sir Thomas Harries, a notable lawyer and one of James I’s baronets created in 1622, purchased the estates of the Onslows and is also recorded as purchasing the manor of ‘Bore Acton’ from Thomas Clive. The son of a Shrewsbury draper and, himself, Sheriff in 1619, Harries was a man of new wealth, his father Roger Harries having been a draper in Shrewsbury.

The Harries family, though, do not seem to have taken easily to their new landed status and were unpopular to some. The second baronet, Sir Paul Harries (d. 1644) who was Sheriff in 1637, was recorded by Richard Gough of Myddle as, ‘a person not well beloved by the antient gentry of this County, for beeing, (as they termed him), but a bucke of the second head’. Gough himself goes on to substantiate this dislike, describing Harries as ‘a proud imperiouse person,’ who was not held in esteem by the ordinary people either.

Sir Paul died in the midst of the Civil Wars and was succeeded by his son Sir Thomas Harries who was, like his father before him, an ardent Royalist which proved to be the undoing of the family. The Boreatton estate of Sir Thomas and his mother Dame Anne was compounded for £1542 and Harries’s implication in a plot to reclaim Shrewsbury for the King in 1655 saw to the eventual severance of the property from the Harries family in circa 1661. The new owner of the estate was the parliamentarian Colonel Thomas Hunt, one-time Governor of Wem and MP for Shrewsbury. Baxter the non-conformist divine described Hunt as ‘a plain-hearted, honest, Godly man’, words that Sir Thomas Harries’ sisters, Eleanor and Anne, were unlikely to concur with – they having unsuccessfully made a case in Chancery in 1668 alleging that Hunt had unlawfully seized their lands.