Gatacre represents one of the ancient seats of Shropshire that was the home, from at latest the thirteenth century until the twentieth century in this particular case, of an eponymous family. The earliest recorded member of the family to be possessed of Gatacre seems to have been Stephen de Gatacre, who held the manors of Gatacre and Sutton in the reign of Henry III and who was married to Alice, daughter and co-heiress of Richard de Bassett. Several of the sixteenth-century members of the family are commemorated by a series of interesting monuments in the South Chapel at All Saints Church in Claverley. These monuments include an incised slab, possibly by the Royley workshop, to William Gatacre (1506–1577), Escheator of Salop 1524–42 who is depicted in armour, together with his wife Eleanor, daughter of William Mytton of Coton Hill and Habberley and their eleven children. Another incised slab is a memorial to their second surviving son, Francis Gatacre (d. 1599) who was both imprisoned and fined as a recusant and who had married Elizabeth, daughter and co-heiress of Humphrey Swinnerton of Swinnerton, Staffordshire and the widow of William Fitzherbert.

The house that preceded the present largely eighteenth-century brick house was timber framed and is reputed, by nineteenth-century writers, to have had an unusual construction: