Preston presents itself as an intriguing sight to motorists negotiating the bends through the hamlet over which it presides, appearing between the buildings of Preston Farm and offering a noble and yet homely domesticity, with attendant stables to the right and walled garden set, amidst recent plantings, to its left. The house is now the seat of the Corbet family of the Acton Reynald and Moreton Corbet estates, yet it was in fact built by the ancestors of the Wingfields of Onslow (q.v.). This occurred during a gap of Corbet ownership which began after the Civil War, when, as Gough in his History of Myddle related ‘…Sir Vincent Corbett, was putt to pay a great sume’ to Parliament as a consequence of his loyalty to the Royalist cause. Gough went on to describe how, finding the required funds with which to pay his fines, Sir Vincent sold some of his property including Preston Brockhurst to:

The builder of the house was Samuel Wingfield, whose family originated at Ashley Hey in Derbyshire. Samuel’s father Thomas had moved from Loughborough in Leicestershire and established himself in Shrewsbury, where he became an alderman, and served as bailiff in 1617 and 1623, before becoming Mayor in 1640. Thomas’s wife was a daughter of John Hunt – uncle of Colonel Thomas Hunt of Boreatton (q.v.) – and she and Thomas also had a younger son, John Wingfield, who purchased Alderton Hall (see Shrawardine Castle q.v.).

Samuel had been admitted a member of Magdalen College, Oxford in 1623 and went on to gain admission at Gray’s Inn in 1637. In addition to his legal career, he made a good marriage to Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Richard Prince of the Whitehall in Shrewsbury and it may have been Elizabeth’s dowry that, in part at least, funded the acquisition and building at Preston in around 1652.

Externally the house appears to have changed little since Samuel Wingfield’s time. Built of white Grinshill ashlar, which now presents a gently weathered visage, the house has a tall entrance elevation of five bays and two storeys that are elevated on a basement, all bound together tightly by string courses.