Ruckley, together with nearby Hatton and Cosford, was in monastic times a grange – or home farm – associated with the Cistercian foundation of Buildwas Abbey. The estate, although not large, has had an almost bewildering series of owners who have each imposed their taste upon the property in both landscape design and architecture, several of them doing so to their financial undoing. As it now stands, the house and its gardens and grounds are an outstanding monument of early twentieth-century patronage, created by the architects Ernest George and Yeates for John Reid Walker (1855–1934), a younger son of the phenomenally wealthy Sir Andrew Barclay Walker (1824–1893), the Burton-on-Trent brewer and the founder of Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.

Prior to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, in 1521, Ruckley Grange was leased by Stephen, last Abbot of Buildwas, for a term of 99 years to John Foster, or Forster, a scion of the family that came to be known as Forester of the Old Hall, Wellington or Watling Street (q.v.). The Forster family and their descendants remained in occupation of the property which, after the Dissolution, came to be owned by Edward Grey, 3rd Baron Grey of Powis (d. 1551 or 1559), and Ruckley, with his other properties at Buildwas, Harnage, Hatton, Cosford, etc., is cited in a grant of 31st March 1545.

Of the house that would have existed at that time, it was said as late as 1878, that vestiges still remained in the kitchens of the house and that the building faced south. Ruckley Grange was one of two moieties that the Greys owned, the other being Ruckley Wood, which passed from Thomas Grey of Hatton Grange, in 1654, to Sir Humphry Briggs of Haughton (q.v.). Briggs, two years later, gave the property to John Smith for £90, and the property passed in 1692 to Roger Roden before being acquired by the Duke of Kingston to become a part of his Tong Castle estate (q.v.).

Ruckley Grange itself was inherited by Mary Forster (d. 1670), the widow of Francis Forster. She remarried to Sir William Glascock of Wormley and the estate passed to him and then to his son, another William, who sold Ruckley Grange to Goldsmith Mills in 1691.