Set high on the southern slopes of the Brown Clee hill in a park with some exceptional plantings, Burwarton is an unexpected oasis midway between Bridgnorth and Ludlow. The house and its estate remains the seat of the present Viscount Boyne, whose ancestors inherited the estate in the early nineteenth century through the marriage of Harriet, daughter and heiress of Benjamin Baugh with the Hon. Gustavus Hamilton, later 6th Viscount Boyne (1777–1855), in 1796.

The Baugh family, in turn, had inherited Burwarton through the marriage of Alice, one of the daughters and co-heiresses of Francis Holland of Burwarton, with Henry Baugh of Aldencourte, in the early seventeenth century. Of the house of the Hollands and Baughs, little is known. The Boyne seat was Stackallen in Ireland, a handsome house built circa 1716 for Gustavus Hamilton (1642–1713), one of the generals of William III for whom he raised six regiments. At the Battle of the Boyne, his horse was shot from under him, whilst he also defended Coleraine and Derry, and he stormed Athlone – for which he was rewarded with the Irish barony of Hamilton in 1715 and then, two years later, the Irish Viscountcy of Boyne. His son, Gustavus 2nd Viscount Boyne (1710–1746) undertook a notable Grand Tour in 1730–1, was elected Dilettanti in 1736 and was a significant patron of the artist William Hogarth.

After the marriage of Harriet Baugh with his descendant, Gustavus Hamilton, and the birth of two children, their marital existence was interrupted by the French Wars, since in May 1803 Hamilton was seized as a prisoner of war, at Verdun in France, and remained there for nine years. The Boynes, as they became in 1816, gave great consideration to their house in Shropshire and, in 1823, were poised to buy Whitton Court (q.v.) from Edmund Lechmere Charlton from whom an agreement of sale was prepared. The proposal had initially come about in 1822, although even then the prospect of a new house at Burwarton was evidently also being considered since Charlton wrote: