Shadwell, a simple two-storey, white-rendered Regency house with low-pitched slate roof and broad eaves, formed the remote seat of the Botfield family in the early nineteenth century. The house is but a three-bay rectangular south-east-facing block, which comprises the main rooms, with an arched entry door on the short north-eastern elevation. Adjoining to the north, to form a T-plan, is a two-and-a-half storeyed service range. With its ranges of farm buildings to the west, the house could not be simpler and yet, until the early twentieth century this was the principal house for an estate of nearly 4,000 acres.

The earlier house on the site was reputedly a very large mansion which, from at least 1633, had belonged to the Howard family. Its drawing room overmantel contained a painting which reputedly showed a drinking scene, with Henry Howard and his mistress, together with Sir Walter Blount and a Mr Bowen of Coustey. Henry Howard, a keen cock-fighter who dissipated his fortune, is thought to have been a son of the Sir Robert Howard who was buried in Clun Church. A large part of the Howard house and its stable at Shadwell was demolished in the eighteenth century, when the place had become the seat of the Flemings. The reduction of scale and status was presumably after Richard Fleming had removed to Sibdon Castle (q.v.). The Flemings continued to own the property into the late eighteenth century.

Shadwell, together with property at Mainstone, Reilth and Woodbach, was purchased by William Botfield (1766–1850) in the first decade of the nineteenth century, with Shadwell itself being acquired from a Mr Fisher in 1809 for £25,500. Botfield’s family were the iron and coal entrepreneurs behind the Old Park Ironworks in Shropshire and their wealth enabled them to build Malinslee Hall – where William Botfield formerly lived – as well as the acquisition of Hopton Court (q.v.) by William’s brother, Thomas. William also made the purchase of Decker Hill (q.v.), which formed his main residence after 1812.

William Botfield took a keen interest in the development of the estate at Shadwell and was able to make a ‘considerable extension of his property on the enclosure of Clun Forest, at that time reported to be the best unenclosed land in England’.