The gentle parklands of The Lyth, experienced with the adjacent grounds of Oteley, greatly enliven the Shrewsbury to Ellesmere road. Passing motorists should be grateful to the vision of the creators, and the custodianship of current owners, for the pastoral scenery which adds enormously to the highway at this point.

The Lyth takes its name from an eponymous family that occupied the property from at least the seventeenth century. John Lyth was the owner in 1649 and he is perhaps the same John Lyth whose will is dated 1679. At his death, John left the property to Robert Lyth of London. Thereafter the Lyth’s landholding was acquired by the Burroughs family who hailed from the nearby hamlet of Lee.

By the early nineteenth century, The Lyth had been acquired by William Sparling (1777–1870) of Petton (q.v.) for his sister, Elizabeth, the wife of Abednego Matthew (d. 1837). Matthew was the owner of the Buckley Estate on the western outskirts of Basseterre at St Kitts, which had belonged to his mother Jeanette, daughter of William Buckley. The Matthew family had hailed from South Wales, although Abednego Matthew’s grandfather, William Matthew, had already established a Caribbean connection. William had been appointed Lieutenant-General of the Leeward Islands in 1715 and then served as Captain-General and Commander-in-Chief from 1735. By 1817 the Matthews’ Buckley plantation employed 130 slaves and was evidently highly productive.

Abednego and Elizabeth Mathew built the present house at The Lyth in 1819 and it survives very much as it was when first built. Writing on 6th September 1820, Juliana Glegg wrote that ‘Mrs Mathew has nearly completed the outside of her beautiful new mansion, the grounds are by nature perfect, and by next spring they hope to take possession’, suggesting that the house took a total of two years to build. Originally a lodge gate at the Whitchurch Road junction, opposite Oteley Park, provided the main entrance to the demesne, crossing the canal and sweeping up to the house itself.

During the building of the house, the Matthews lived across the road at Oteley, renting that house from the Mainwaring family who had moved to Chester following the death of Charles Mainwaring in 1807.