Peplow Hall is set amidst the flat, rolling landscape of north Shropshire, the main house presenting an early eighteenth-century appearance in red brick, gazing across parkland and the River Tern, which flows through the lake to the east of the house. The house belies the fact that it was, in fact, dramatically reduced in the third decade of the twentieth century, when a large three-storeyed block was demolished and the remainder – of two storeys – was given new life.

The estate, like the house, has had a complicated descent with the result that records for the house’s development are somewhat scant. A part of the Hodnet manor (q.v.), Peplow appears to have followed that property’s descent through the de Ludlows and Vernons. In 1715, Sir Richard Vernon, 3rd Bt (1678–1725), is said to have sold it to his steward, Hugh Pigot, for £5,000. The Pigots were an old Cheshire family, originally from Somerford, near Congleton, but had a distant blood relationship with the Vernons and members of their family are known to have been living at Peplow in the late seventeenth century. There appears to have been a major campaign of building at Peplow in 1725, borne out by dates on sundials which ornament the deep parapets of the west, east and south façades of the present house. Understanding exactly what was done then is not easy on account of subsequent alterations, especially the interventions made in the 1870s by the Stanier family and by restorations in the 1930s that followed the reduction of the house (see below). The centre three bays of the current west-facing entrance front, with their unusual rubbed brick shaped-headers to the first-floor windows, appear to be of this campaign. Inside, the staircase – albeit re-sited – which has plain-turned, barley-twist and iron-twist balusters to each tread, may also have been a part of this work.

The client at this time was Robert Pigot, who was sometimes described as ‘of Eaton’ in Cheshire, and who worked for the Grosvenor family. For his services during the election of 1725 in Chester, he was granted nine years of lead mining rights on the Grosvenor estates at Halkyn, Brynford and Ysgeifiog in Flintshire and it may have been this wealth which enabled the building at Peplow.