The wooded location of The Lodge at Overton, on the edge of Mortimer Forest, is said to have been the inspiration for Milton when he wrote his celebrated Comus. The dingle, known as Sunny Gutter, which dips down in front of the present house, is claimed to be the poem’s intended setting. Augmented with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ornamental planting, this now provides an appropriately arcadian setting for the classical Palladian villa.

The Salwey family, whose seat The Lodge remains, have been resident at no less than six different houses on an evolving pattern of landownership that straddles the Shropshire and Herefordshire borders. The family originally hailed from Cannock in Staffordshire and their earliest recorded ancestor, Geoffrey of Salewey, is known to have held lands at Norton-under-Cannoc in 1216. By the mid seventeenth century, the family were resident at Stanford near to Bewdley, with Humphrey Salwey of Stanford a member of the Lay Parliament prior to 1653. His fifth son by Anne – second daughter of Sir Edward Littleton of Pillaton – was Richard, who settled at Richard’s Castle.

Richard Salwey was a notable Parliamentarian, serving as a Major in Cromwell’s army and he clearly maintained an international outlook, not only being appointed as Ambassador to Constantinople in 1654, but establishing his younger sons in overseas mercantile careers, with two of them merchants in Turkey. This, and the fact that these junior lines failed to have descendants, meant that there was ultimately a concentration of wealth for the senior branch of the family at their estates to the south of Ludlow.

Richard Salwey had rebuilt The Hayes or Haye Park, just over the county border into Herefordshire, in 1661, and had bought nearby Elton Hall, in the same county, in 1674. The latter, together with The Moor (see Moor Park, q.v) had apparently formed an acquisition made from Salwey’s cousins, the Littletons of Pillaton in Staffordshire, who were disposing of their more distant properties. The main line of the family, from the early eighteenth century, lived at Moor Park, until that property’s disposal by sale in 1873, whilst The Lodge became the residence of a junior line.