The former seat of the Longueville family who claimed descent from Sir Kenelm Digby via his great-granddaughter, Lady Longueville. In the late nineteenth century, the house’s collections contained Digby’s portrait and also other heirlooms associated with him, including plates and a manuscript in his handwriting.

Penylan had been an estate of the Muckleston family, who apparently owned the property from the sixteenth century until at least the eighteenth century. John Muckleston had married a daughter of Edward Lloyd of Llwyn-y-Maen (q.v.) and was described as ‘of Pen-y-Lan in Llanforda’. His son, Edward, who was Recorder of Oswestry in 1615, married Mary, the daughter and heiress of Thomas Corbett of Merrington, near Bomere Heath, and so also inherited that estate. To Richard Gough, writing in his History of Myddle, their son Rowland Muckleston was a ‘gentleman of an ancient family’ and Gough considered Penylan to be ‘a faire house, and an Estate of about 120l per annum’.

The estate was acquired by the Longueville Jones family in the early nineteenth century and the majority of the house that one sees today was probably built for Thomas Longueville Jones (d. 1831), a wealthy Oswestry solicitor, who had married Miss Anne Gibbons and assumed the name of Longueville. Mayor of Oswestry in 1807, he lived initially at Bellan House in Church Street in the town. His father was Captain Thomas Jones of Willow House, Wrexham, who was killed in a dual at Whitchurch in 1799. Captain Jones’s mother, Margaretta Maria, was the eldest daughter of Sir Thomas Longueville (d. 1759), fourth and last baronet, and his Lady of Esclusham Hall near Wrexham. The Longueville name was thus adopted by the Oswestry solicitor after his kinsman Richard Wilding – who had been married to a granddaughter of the last Longueville baronet – died in 1825.

The majority of the house was built in the Italianate style in the 1830s, as a handsome two-storeyed rendered brick villa with nine-pane sashes on each elevation. The three-bay east-facing garden front retains the intended form, with the outer two bays projecting slightly and having twin open pediments created from the low pitched eaves. The ground floor of each has a tripartite window set below a shallow segmental arch.