The estate at Cloverley was previously occupied by a moated house, although in 1851 only the moat and bridge remained. The property, at that time, was the seat of the Dod family, a junior branch of the family from Edge Hall in Cheshire (now the Wolley-Dod family), who descended from John, son of Roger Dod of Edge who was living in circa 1350. John’s great-grandson and namesake, who married Johanna, daughter and co-heiress of John Warren of Ightfield, in the reign of Richard II, had a son called Hugh. He seems to have been the first of the family that was styled as ‘of Cloverley’.

In circa 1790, the then owner, Robert Dod (1744–1801), High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1773, who had married Mary, the daughter of Broughton Whitehall of Broughton, is said to have rebuilt the house in ‘Doric style’. This perhaps accounts for Bagshaw’s 1851 description of the house as ‘a commodious brick mansion, stuccoed, with a front of hewn freestone, and a noble portico supported by six fluted pillars’. A drawing by Frederick Peake, shows the front of the house in the early nineteenth century with a pair of three storey canted bays embracing a lower, recessed, three-bay block, and united by a single storey Greek Doric colonnade of six columns which bears out this description. If the Greek Doric colonnade was a part of Robert Dod’s work then, stylistically, it would have been very early for the Shrewsbury architects, and might have been undertaken post 1795 to designs by Thomas Harrison of Chester.

Robert Dod’s grandson, John Whitehall Dodd (1797–1863), was, like his grandfather, High Sheriff of Shropshire, serving in 1825, and he was also MP for North Shropshire in 1849–59. In spite of his public offices, the agricultural depression of the later nineteenth century affected the family badly and, in 1863, J.W. Dod retired to Rhyl owing to his debts, dying soon afterwards.