The story of the country houses of Shropshire, as indeed in any other county, is one of people and place. It is the coming together of topography and natural advantage and also of natural disadvantage, with human achievement, opportunism, skill, and endeavour. The result of these factors in, at times, very different measures, are the individual houses that are described in this work.

Shropshire is the largest inland English county, marching with Wales on its western border, and clockwise from north with Cheshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire. Being of such scale and with such neighbours, it has an understandably varied terrain and a surprisingly large number and variety of houses. John Piper and John Betjeman considered there to be five types of Shropshire landscape: the ‘flattish hunting scenery’ and ‘miniature lake district’ of the North; the former industrial areas around Coalport and Coalbrookdale and what is today the new town of Telford; the hill landscape of Wenlock Edge and the south-eastern borders with Worcestershire; the South Shropshire hills of the Clun Forest and Longmynd; and the westerly and north-westerly Welsh borders or, as they described it ‘a bit of North Wales that invades’.

It is a topography that inevitably affects the types of houses that were built in their respective locations: it would be as difficult to imagine the great neoclassical scale of a house like Attingham, tucked away into the folds of the land around Clun, as it would be to imagine an extraordinary survival such as Stokesay Castle on the outskirts of the county town.

Much of this diverse topography was wooded prior to clearance for agriculture and for the increasing development of the charcoal-fuelled iron industry in the county. This gained traction in monastic times and generated significant private fortunes for the owners of several country houses in the post-Dissolution period. Shropshire, whilst today a largely agricultural county, has always been an area of extraordinarily rich mineral deposits which were – and, in some cases, still are – a valuable resource for those owning the land that contains them. Shropshire holds a large portion of the Silurian district and, in researching and describing it, Sir Roderick Murchison (1792–1871) was received in a number of the houses described in this book.