A little single-storey, Victorian Italianate lodge on the Montgomery road guards the entrance to Winsley, which stands embedded in its little park beyond enjoying splendid views to the Long Mountain. The present brick house was greatly enlarged in several phases during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, yet the original nucleus at its heart can still be seen, built in 1805 by Samuel Sneade (1764–1819).

This is a three-storey house of three generous bays, set beneath a low-pitched slated roof with broad eaves. The north-facing entrance front, with the central bay projecting slightly, still bears Sneade’s initials and the date over the main door. Inside, the cantilevered stone staircase with simple scroll headed and footed balusters – not unlike those on Joseph Bromfield’s staircase at Berrington Hall, Shropshire – evidently survives from Sneade’s time.

Samuel Sneade had purchased the property in 1804 from Thomas Boycott and there is no record of an earlier house of any consequence, although it is known that a hamlet with at least two farms occupied the land where the house now stands.

On Sneade’s death in 1819, Winsley went to his daughter, Harriet, the wife of John Blakeway Tipton, and they sold the estate to John Phillips in 1839. Phillips seems to have been responsible for adding the west wing, a three-storeyed block of the height and, almost the length, of the original build, which dates from circa 1850. In 1863 Phillips sold Winsley to Robert Miller of Edinburgh for £40,0004 – the architect Edward Haycock was to receive a proportion of the sale price and it is therefore possible that he had been engaged in the works and that these had not yet been paid for. Miller retained ownership for just five years, selling the estate on in 1868 to John Whitaker (1829–1899).

Whitaker also owned Broadclough, Bacup, in Lancashire, an early nineteenth-century neoclassical house, which he had inherited from his father, James Whitaker (1789–1855). The Broadclough Estate had been associated with the Whitakers since at least 1510 when John Whitaker of Broadclough was present at a meeting of copyhold tenants of the Forest of Rossendale. Industrial development in Lancashire and James Whitaker’s marriage to Harriet – the daughter of the merchant John Ormerod of Bankside, Manchester – had brought new money to the family.