The Betton family owned the Great or Upper Berwick estate from at least 1399 until the sale of the property in 1864. They are supposed to have formerly been seated at Betton Strange, taking their name from that place. William Betton was seated at Great Berwick at the time of the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 and it is said that Harry Hotspur stayed at the house on the eve of the Battle. On the morning of the conflict, Hotspur is said to have called for his favourite sword only to be advised that this had been left at the place that they had stayed. When told that the place was called Berwick, Hotspur reputedly turned pale and uttered: ‘I perceive that my plough is drawing to its last furrow, for a wizard told me in Northumberland that I should perish at Berwick, which I vainly interpreted of that town in the North’. Hotspur, of course, met his end.

The Betton line continued at Berwick, espousing the Royalist cause in the Civil Wars, although a younger son, Rev. James Betton, was Puritan Vicar at St Mary’s in Shrewsbury and his nephew, John, younger son of Richard Betton of Great Berwick and his wife Eleanor Purcell of Dinthill, took the Parliamentary side. The elder son of the Betton-Purcell marriage, another Richard Betton (1649–1725), was the builder of the present house at Great Berwick. Married to Hannah Billings, in 1674, he was the father of eight children.

With strong similarities to Newport House (1696), on Dogpole, Shrewsbury, Great Berwick is of red brick with stone quoins and a hipped roof rising above a heavy dentil cornice. Here, though, the entrance front has a steep, oculus-centred pediment rising over the centre two bays and flanked by a pair of dormers with triangular pediments. This front is of six bays and two storeys, with eight-paned sashes and a central projecting pedimented porch at ground floor level which appears to be a nineteenth-century addition. The house’s side elevations are of four bays, with sashes that are now twelve-paned.