Set in a small former park above the River Ledwych, close to an Iron Age hill fort, Caynham is a solid late eighteenth-century brick house of two-and-a-half storeys, its low pitched roof concealed behind a parapet. The main front has two full height canted bays to each side of a three-bay recessed centre; the canted bays were superimposed on projections of two bays’ width that were depicted by Moses Griffith in the 1790s. Griffith showed the house to be limewashed and this treatment is also born out in a painting of the early nineteenth century by Thomas Page that shows the house, by the time that Page set up his easel, to have gained its canted bays.

Prior to the Dissolution, Caynham was a property of Wigmore Abbey, but passed to John Adams in 1541. His successor, Charles Adams passed the estate in 1584 to Charles Foxe (1505–1590) whose great-grandson Somerset Foxe (1618–1689) sold the estate to Thomas Powys of Henley (q.v.) for £2,077 in 1668.

The Powys family appear to have rented out Caynham until its sale, in 1776, by a later Thomas Powys to Joseph Oldham (d.1809). Oldham was a Bewdley hop merchant who had also acquired Hopton Court (q.v.) and it might have been the latter property’s subsequent sale, in 1779, that provided additional capital for a rebuilding of Caynham Court. Oldham served as High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1789 but sold Caynham in 1792 for £18,300 and was later described as ‘of Haydon in Somerset’.

The new owner was the Reverend William Calcot, who hailed from Great Witley in Worcestershire and, by 1831, Caynham was the seat of the Reverend’s successor, Captain Berkeley Calcot; six years later it was George Berkley Calcot’s. The Calcot tenure was short, though, and in 1851 the house was empty prior to being sold, in the following year with its estate of about 1,000 acres, to Sir William Curtis, 3rd Bt (1804–1870).

Sir William’s family had made their fortune from the manufacture of sea-biscuits and in shipping, having vessels that operated in South Sea whaling and the transportation of convicts to Australia.