Hidden away, as its name suggests, close to the River Rea south of Cleobury Mortimer, Reaside Manor is something of an enigma. It is a poorly recorded house and, indeed, there is no certainty as to who the ‘I.T.T.R.’ initials and remnant wheel armorial refer to on the north porch of the house. Mrs Edward Childe recorded that the house had been occupied by Richard Walker in 1650–61, followed in 1690 by Richard Gower, and seven years later by John Jordan. The property was eventually purchased in 1720 by the Meysey family and, at the time that she was writing in 1879, it was the property of Mrs Wickstead.

Long occupied as a farmhouse, the property was most recently sold in 1992, when it was accompanied with just 65 acres. Reaside Manor has since been carefully restored and, as it stands, appears to date from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, built of grey siltstone rubble with an ashlar string course which runs around the north and west fronts. That the string course does not continue around the east side suggests that what stands today is not the complete, intended, building and that the house was, at some stage truncated. Yet Reaside is still a substantial and interesting house, of two storeys and attics above a basement level, and with two great projecting chimney stacks to the south and west sides. On the south there is a serried row of three star-plan brick chimney shafts, whilst on the west, two similar chimney shafts rise above the roofline.

On the south front, the broad, west gable to one side is opposed by a narrow projecting porch gable to the east – which gives the house a further feeling of having been foreshortened. On the north side – the original entrance side – this arrangement of gables is mirrored, although a further gabled projection, in the form of the north porch, rises up – almost centrally – east of the broader west gable end.

Beyond the porch, one enters the end of the hall, which still retains its seventeenth-century panelling. The staircase stands at the centre of the house and rises from the sub-floor right up to the roof, a handsome piece of Jacobean work, within a relatively restricted open well.