Summary
One of Shropshire’s highest country houses, standing at 780 feet above sea level, Court of Hill was claimed by the early nineteenth-century historian, the Reverend John Blakeway, to have been the stem seat of the Hill family, who, he suggested, were descended from the de la Hulles who lived at the site in medieval times. Burke’s now tempers this view, in giving the earliest recorded member of the Hill family to live there as William, the elder son of Humphry Hill of Buntingsdale (q.v.) and his wife Agnes, daughter and co-heir of John Bird. The suggestion, though, is that the Hill family of Court of Hill were the senior branch of the Shropshire Hill families.
The house as it stands is, externally, largely a set-piece of the late seventeenth century. In a large rectangular tablet above the central door of the south front, there is the date of 1683 together with the arms of its builder, Andrew Hill and his wife Anne, daughter of Thomas Powys of Henley (q.v.), whom he, in fact, married later – in 1697. Thomas served as High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1681 and Anne was the sister of Sir Littleton Powys (c. 1647–1732), Baron of the Exchequer, and the house sets out to confirm their status. It is a rectangular house of brick with stone quoins and string courses that run flush to the brickwork. The main south front is of seven bays and two storeys, surmounted by a high hipped roof, that is raised on coved eaves, and from which three hipped dormers peep. Late nineteenth-century images show the house with what appear to be its original cruciform casement windows. These were altered to the present form, post–1926, when the house had been acquired by the Fielden family. The Fieldens were also responsible for the entrance porch of the west front, flanked to each side by a Venetian window which brings a little neo-Georgian jollity to the otherwise sober Stuart house. Court of Hill does, though, have yet earlier remains, which can be seen on the eastern side, where stonework and the star-shaped chimney shafts suggest early seventeenth-century work that was too useful to be swept away and which was incorporated, discreetly, into the new build of 1683.
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- The Country Houses of Shropshire , pp. 197 - 199Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021