Burford occupies an ancient site at the meeting point of Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and it stands in the place of Burford or Scrob’s Castle. The Castle’s designation as Scrob’s came from it having formed a part of the lands of Richard, son of Scrob, who in the time of Edward the Confessor held lands which extended from Richard’s Castle and included Burford. Burford later passed from the de Says and the Mortimer family to Sir Geoffrey Cornwall, later 1st Baron of Burford. The Cornwall family remained the owners of the estate for four hundred years, their funerary monuments forming one of the great glories of nearby St Mary’s Church in Burford. Sadly nothing survives of their mansion at Burford; it does not appear to have been recorded in any visual records, yet it must have been a significant structure.

The Cornwall family ownership of Burford ended with Francis, 16th and last Baron. His estates passed to his daughter the wife of George Legh of High Legh in Cheshire. She and her husband sold Burford to William Bowles (1686–1748) for £35,0005 in 1727. Bowles was the proprietor of the Vauxhall Glass Works at London, which his grandfather John Bowles had established in 1667, and he served as MP for Bridport (1727–1741) and for Bewdley (1741–1748). The transition of ownership of Burford proved not an easy one, since the estate had been advertised as including a deer park and Bowles’s discovery that this was not the case led to six years of legal wrangling.

The present Georgian red brick house was built in circa 1728 for Bowles and it offers a handsome north front of six bays and three storeys divided by plat bands and crowned by a parapet, which partially conceals the tiled roof. The date of 1728 is given on a rainwater head. At the ground floor, the sparse arrangement of two bays of windows each side of a broad doorcase with an open pediment raised upon Greek Doric columns, flanking a pair of glazed doors and fanlight, appears to be an early nineteenth-century alteration to the house; originally there were evidently a further pair of windows to each side of the central doorway, but these have been filled in.