Ness Strange stands on the site of the former manor house of the le Strange family from whom its takes its distinctive name. The present, handsome house, of estate-made red brick, was built in the 1770s and stands in the lee of the wooded Nesscliffe Hill. It is said to have succeeded a long and low house with a half-timbered upper storey, a part of which was incorporated into the new build.

Great Ness estate was purchased by John Edwards (d. 1710) in 1662/3 from Captain Richard Smith. Edwards was able to add additional land to his purchase, as a result of acquisitions made by his father-in-law, Thomas Barnes of Lowe Hall (q.v.) from the Earl of Bridgewater. The Georgian house was built for John Edwards’ great-grandson, Rowland Edwards, who inherited the property on his father’s death in 1775. A general day book of ‘work and materials for carrying on a new buildings at Great Ness’ is dated 1778, and the house was said to have been unfinished in September 1782, when Rowland Edwards appealed against an assessment of window tax on fifty-seven windows. The architect’s name has not been recorded, but the south-facing front, of two-and-a-half storeys with two canted bays flanking a two-bay centre, together with a distinctive tripartite doorcase – formerly at the centre but now reused on the west wing – suggests one of the circle of Thomas Farnolls Pritchard as a possible author.

Rowland Edwards’ son John, who had married Charlotte Martin, a granddaughter of the 3rd Duke of Atholl and his wife Charlotte Baroness Strange of Knockin, succeeded to the property on his father’s death in 1796. There is a suggestion that further works were carried on at the house in his time and these possibly included a single-storey stone porch which sat on the two central bays – between the canted windows of the south front – until its removal in the early twentieth century.

On John’s death in 1855, Ness Strange, with its estate of about 800 acres, became the seat of his son, Colonel George Rowland Edwards (1810–1894). Colonel Edwards had gone to India at the age of sixteen in the service of the East India Company. In his thirty-six years there, he established the first Mohammedan Girls’ School.