The site of Buntingsdale, on a prominent position above the River Tern, was supposedly formerly occupied by a timber-framed house. The estate had been an early seat of the Hill family and ultimately passed to Margaret Hill (d. 1620), a natural daughter of the Rev. William Hill, Rector of Stoke on Tern, whose brother was Sir Rowland Hill of Hawkstone. Margaret was married to Rowland Bulkeley, of a family seated at Woore on the other side of Market Drayton, and so brought Buntingsdale to that family. Their great-granddaughter, Anne Bulkeley, in 1652, married Thomas Mackworth (c. 1628–1696) of Betton Strange (q.v.).

Anne and Thomas Mackworth had two sons, the eldest of whom, Bulkeley Mackworth (1653–1730) inherited the family’s Shropshire estates, whilst his younger brother Humphrey (1657–1727, knighted 1682/3) married Mary, the daughter and eventual-heiress of Sir Herbert Evans of the Gnoll in Glamorgan, and eventually acquired the mineral-rich estates of the Evans family and of his wife’s mother’s family, the Morgans from Monmouthshire.

Bulkeley, having succeeded his father, determined to build a new family seat at Buntingsdale and was responsible for the main body of the house as it now stands. He served as High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1714 and the new house was begun five years later in 1719. Bearing in mind that he was not married and would have been sixty-six at the time that the house began to rise, his reasons for moving from the paternal seat and building anew are intriguing. In terms of succession, the property was not to descend for long in the Mackworth family.

For funding, Bulkeley Mackworth seems to have relied on mortgages from the Hon. Richard Hill of Hawkstone, but in terms of his architect this seems to have been more of a metropolitan matter. Although full documentation for the house does not appear to have survived – reputedly having been taken from the house, but not returned, in the nineteenth century by Samuel Pountney Smith – sufficient evidence seems to prove that the initial design and building of Buntingsdale was inaugurated under John Prince, the surveyor of the Harley Estate in London and architect of Cound (q.v.). It was certainly concluded by Francis Smith of Warwick. Subsequent alterations may have altered the roofline of the house and the balustrade that now runs around the parapet is, surely, Victorian.