Robert More of Thonglands bought the Millichope estate in 1544, and the house remained a seat of the More family until the early nineteenth century. The house was depicted by Mrs Stackhouse Acton as a close studded, three-storeyed, gabled building with an entrance on the central of three gabled projections, and with two great stacks of chimneys rising behind the main ridge of the roof. The appearance of the house suggested a mid sixteenth-century date, although it is possible that the building had even earlier origins.

In 1607 Charles More (d. 1646) was the owner of Millichope, being succeeded by his son, Thomas (d. 1689), who in turn was briefly succeeded by his son, Henry (d. 1689), and then by Henry’s son, Thomas More (d. 1767). This younger Thomas, it seems, had a keen interest in gardening and it would appear that it was he who began remodelling the landscape around the old timbered mansion in the middle years of the eighteenth century. He sadly lost his three sons during his lifetime and the works, thereafter, seem to have been both as a solace and as a memorial. His second son, Lieutenant Leighton More of the Burford Man of War, had died aged twenty-five in 1744; his third son, Major John More of the 79th Regiment, died when shot by an arrow at the storming of Manilla in 1762, aged forty-two; and his eldest son, Thomas, died of pleurisy in 1766. A tantalising reference to Millichope’s gardens is made in the will of Thomas’s son, Major John More, of 1760 and in codicils of 1762. Here mention is made to a legacy of £500 to be left to Thomas More for ‘improving and enlarging the Rock Garden opposite to the Park of Millichope Hall’, with a further £500 to erect a monument to himself in the Rock Garden and to complete the ‘Chinese (and water) works’.

The two brothers from the armed services are commemorated by the statue of a winged putto with a globe which is contained within a domed Ionic rotunda with enclosed cella. The rotunda, at 1770, post-dates the elder Thomas’s death, and its architect was George Steuart.