Oakly is a house that is understated in its sophistication; an eminently attractive red brick house with stone dressings that exudes all the comfort of an English country house and yet which, in the detail conferred upon it by Robert Henry Clive and his architect C.R. Cockerell, is an academic and, indeed, archaeological reference work. Architect and patron worked together over a period of time, remodelling an earlier structure with an extraordinary level of care and attention for every detail. The sympathetic relationship between architect and patron was such that, in 1838, Cockerell could reflect:

The present estate at Oakly comprises a joining of the former hunting park of Ludlow Castle together with the lands of the former Benedictine Priory of Bromfield, which stood on the opposite bank of the River Teme from the Park. After the Dissolution, the Priory and its estate was leased in 1541 – and then later purchased in 1563–4 – by Charles Foxe (c. 1516–1590) of Caynham, who served as Sheriff of Shropshire in 1583. He created a house on the site of the former cloister, and the fragmentary ruined remnants of this, a two-storey red sandstone structure with mullioned and transomed windows, still remain attached to the side of St Mary’s Parish Church. Its windows had sunk-chamfered mullions, a sophisticated detail which can also be found in the Sidney apartments at Ludlow Castle. The building’s life as a mansion was apparently short, since it was burned in the seventeenth century. Happily, the former monastic gatehouse survives in much better condition, its stone lower storey and stout, northerly, arched entry suggestive of a fourteenth-century date and with a timber-framed upper-storey of pre–1600 date.