Shipton is, in many ways, the beau ideal of the Shropshire manor house. With the little church of St James on the hillock to the south, amongst stately lime trees, the gabled house itself sits atop a gentle run of terraces, with eighteenth-century pedimented stables below at right angles and a circular columbarium behind. H.E. Forrest, writing in 1915, rightly suggested that it made a picture ‘which, as regards both form and colour, satisfies the artistic sense of even the most fastidious’. Even today, the ensemble remains an arresting and delightful sight to motorists on the Much Wenlock to Craven Arms road.

Shipton occupies an old site and the property was at one time in monastic hands – held by Wenlock Priory from at least 1066 until the Dissolution. Having been surrendered to the Crown in 1540, the property was sold in 1548 to Sir Thomas Palmer, whose charge of treason, in 1553, saw the estate recalled.

The Crown again sold Shipton, this time to Thomas Reve and Anthony Rotsey who, four years later, conveyed it to John Swyfte. A further succession of owners followed, with Swyfte selling on, in 1560, to Edward Gilbert who, in the following year, sold it to John Molyneux. Molyneux held on to Shipton for nineteen years, until 1580, when the property was acquired by John Lutwyche (c. 1543–1615), the sixth son of the eponymous family from nearby Lutwyche Hall (q.v.). John’s father, Richard, had been the rebuilder of the family’s ancestral home, whilst he and his elder brother Edward – who succeeded to Lutwyche – followed careers in the law. In John’s case this was as an attorney at Lincoln’s Inn, yet in Shropshire he also maintained strong legal contacts, serving as an executor of the will of Judge Thomas Owen of Condover (q.v.).

At Shipton, John Lutwyche was responsible for the rebuilding of the chancel at the parish church of St James in 1589, where a brass inscription recalls that it was ‘re edified and builded of newe from the foundation and glased’ by him.