A proud, late nineteenth-century mansion, it was built in 1859 for Robert Peel Ethelston to the designs of Samuel Pountney Smith.

The Rev. Charles Wicksted Ethelston of Wickstead Hall, Cheshire, had acquired the Hinton estate in 1857, the property having previously been owned by the Boycott family, who had been there since the early seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century William Boycott (1696–1743) had acquired the Rudge Hall (q.v.) estate on the eastern edge of Shropshire and that eventually became the family’s preferred seat.

Rev. Charles Wicksted Ethelston, Rector of Worthenbury, of Wickstead Hall had married Anne, daughter and heiress of Robert Peel of Wallington Hall, Norfolk, himself a son of Edmund Peel, elder brother of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel.

Rev. and Mrs Ethelston’s eldest son Edmund, inherited Bryn-y-Pys, the Welsh seat of the Peels and so assumed the name and arms of that family in 1831. Hinton’s builder was his younger brother, Robert Peel Ethelston (1831–1906) who initially lived at Emral Hall, Flintshire, in the years after his marriage to Miss Phillipa Perry-Watlington of Moor Hall, Essex, but then went on to commission his own seat.

The position of the house, on an eminence, is an ideal one, allowing it to create a sense of drama within the landscape and arouse a sense of anticipation, as well as being the perfect perch for enjoying views from within the house of its immediate gardens. Of red brick with red sandstone dressings and a peppering of blue-brick diaper-work in the gables, the house is crowned by tiled roofs and soaring star-shaped chimney stacks. The massing of the house is unusually compact with the two-storeyed entrance porch canted into the angle between two wings and surmounted by open strapwork.

Within the porch, a round arched doorway contains a pair of panelled doors that lead through to the entrance hall with its chamfered stone, Tudor-style fireplace and a balcony running across the back wall, with Jacobean-style balusters and tall newels which have pierced finials. An archway leads off the entrance hall to the top-lit staircase hall, where a great dog-legged staircase rises up through the height of the house to a vaulted wooden ceiling.

Robert Peel Ethelston had five sons – the eldest of whom, Edmund Ethelston (1857–1922), succeeded him at Hinton – and also two daughters.