Henley stands to the east of Ludlow in a handsome park which borders the River Ledwyche. A tantalising glimpse of the house is afforded from the Cleobury Mortimer road, where the long brick façade can be seen at the end of a straight drive, framed by the filigree of wrought iron gates by the Davies brothers. The gates were brought in from Wirksworth Hall, Derbyshire, in the late nineteenth century, at a time when the drive was lined with elms that had supposedly been planted in 1816. Henley preserves a stately dignity; the house is coy about its architectural origins and there is a paucity of documentation to give certainty to the house’s development.

The estate was acquired by Thomas Powys (1617– 1671), son of Thomas Powys of Snitton in the parish of Bitterley. It was probably Powys who was responsible for the core of the house as it stands today, perhaps rebuilding an earlier timber-framed house in brick. There is no certainty as to dates, though, and later alterations have made the house’s development hard to assimilate. It is composed of a tall, narrow, three-storeyed range that faces north and south, with two broad, gabled, three-bay outer wings and a pair of narrower three-bay gabled inner wings which flank a centre four-storeyed bay that is now crowned by an eighteenth-century pediment. The outer gabled ranges still have their mullioned and transomed windows whilst the star-shaped brick chimney stacks appear to have survived from the seventeenth-century build.

Thomas Powys was Serjeant-at-Law and made an alliance to another legal family in his first marriage to Anne (d. 1655), daughter of Sir Adam Littleton, 1st Bt of Stoke Milburgh, Chief Justice of North Wales. After Anne’s death, he married again, to Mary, daughter of John Cotes of Woodcote, and through that marriage produced Richard Powys, who established a line of the family at Hintlesham Hall, Suffolk, and also Anne, the first wife of Thomas Hill of Tern (now Attingham, q.v.). By his first wife, Thomas Powys produced two sons who followed their father into the law, both becoming judges, both knighted and both masters of Henley. The eldest was Sir Littleton Powys (1647–1731), who was Chief Justice of North Wales, Baron of the Exchequer in 1695–1720 and a Judge of the King’s Bench. Married to Anne Carter (d.