As it appears today, Broadward is an amusing little piece of plagiarism – a realisation of J.A. Repton’s design for Stanage Park, Radnorshire, reconfigured, somewhat unconvincingly, within a remarkably short distance of that house, for the Bayley Unett family. The builders at that time were almost certainly John Hiram and Edward Haycock who were engaged in the construction of Repton’s Stanage and were constantly meddling with the design of that house – much to the annoyance of Repton’s father Humphry, the landscape gardener. Whilst at Stanage Park the picturesque location of that house works to the advantage of the architectural design, at Broadwood, on flat, featureless meadows now largely denuded of any mature park trees, the house is a disappointment. Internally, the house is more rewarding and has an elliptical cantilevered staircase, contemporary with the Regency build, whilst the drawing room has a good late eighteenth-century Bossi-type chimneypiece of scagliola-inlaid Carrara marble.

The lodge, a single-storeyed, three-bay structure with central pedimented segmental-arched opening, is a design that Edward Haycock proffered to John Wingfield at Onslow (q.v.) and further endorses the Haycock attribution.

Broadward is not, however, wholly a Regency pop-up but a property on which an earlier house was adapted and encased. The original estate had been a part of the Hopton Castle estates of the de Hoptons and their successors, the Corbets and Wallops. When Henry Wallop sold off the Hopton Estate in 1653–8, Broadward appears to have become the property of John Poyner ‘Gent’, although he had died by 1658. Poyner’s daughter, Eleanor had married Richard Bayley (d. 1673/4) and the property thereafter passed to that family. At the time of the Hearth Tax return in 1672, Broadward was recorded as possessing seven hearths, indicating that it was a sizeable house, whilst Richard Bayley’s will of 1673/4 gives tantalising detail of the house in citing furniture in the ‘best Porch Chamber’.

After Richard’s death, his son and namesake initially inherited but died in 1681 with Broadward then passing to his brother Dr Francis Bayley (d. 1728/9). The doctor had married Ursula Cornwall (d. 1749/50) and brought the Herefordshire property of the Cornwalls to the family.

Dr Francis Bayley and his wife’s son, Francis (1736–1761), predeceased them and so Broadward ultimately passed to their daughter, Letitia (1733–1804), who had married Henry Unett of Freen’s Court, Herefordshire in 1762.