Much of the charm of Bitterley, which stands on the lower slopes of the Titterstone Clee Hill, owes to the Walcot family’s reinvention of the house in the late 1760s. At this time, the front door was moved round by ninety degrees and the house given a series of interiors with assistance from the architect Thomas Farnolls Pritchard, bringing the house up to date. This followed the purchase of the property by Charles Walcot (b. 1738) in 1768 following his sale of the main ancestral home at Walcot (q.v.) to Robert Clive.

Bitterley Court had, however, been an important house before the George III alterations. It is set next to the parish church of St Mary and makes a highly attractive manorial group with the H-plan house, itself, probably dating from the late sixteenth century. A solitary brick chimney stack on the north-east side of the house survives, crowned by star-plan shafts, the form of which suggests a date of circa 1580. The estate was owned by Thomas Bowker and in 1655 it was purchased from him by an earlier generation of the Walcots and also the Littletons of Henley Hall (q.v.). Mary (d. 1695), the daughter of Sir Adam Littleton, married Thomas Walcot (1625–1685) in the parish church at Bitterley in 1663 and the couple established themselves at Bitterley Court. Thomas was a successful lawyer who had entered the Middle Temple in 1645 and gone on to hold various high-ranking posts, becoming Serjeant-at-Law in May 1680 and a Justice of the King’s Bench three years later, in addition to serving as MP for Ludlow in 1679. During their time, the Hearth Tax return of 1672 recorded Bitterley Court as having twelve hearths.

The couple’s only child died in infancy and Bitterley passed, at their deaths, to Thomas’s elder brother, John Walcot of Walcot (1624–1702). Bitterley then passed, with Walcot, to John’s son Charles, before separating from the main family estate, when it went to Charles’s younger brother, Humphrey Walcot. His son and namesake, the Rev. Humphrey Walcot then appears to have parted with Bitterley to William Pearce Hall of Downton Hall (q.v.).