72 - Coton Hall, Edstaston
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2023
Summary
Ignored by Pevsner in 1958 and again at the revision of The Buildings of England in 2006, Coton stands as a sizeable Victorian country house of the 1830s with red brick gables and stone mullioned windows and which was rebuilt for the Honeyman family, apparently in circa 1875. At its core, as some of the chimneys suggest, is a yet older structure. The house had been inherited by the Honeymans from Admiral George Bowen (d. 1844) as a result of the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth Essex Bowen (1797–1864) to Orde John Honyman in 1818. Orde succeeded as the third baronet on the death of his brother Sir Richard, 2nd Bt, in 1842.
The Coton estate is said to have descended from the Maddox family who were seated there in the reign of Edward IV and was then owned by one Richard Ward who, in the time of Elizabeth I, obtained a grant to eat meat during Lent owing to illness. By the time of the Bowen tenure, in the middle of the nineteenth century the seat was described as ‘a good brick mansion’.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Coton was the home of the Rev. Sir William Macdonald Honeyman, 5th Bt, who died there at the age of ninety-two in 1911. He was a clergyman, who had succeeded his brother, Sir George Essex Honeyman, 4th Bt, a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, in 1875. With his death, Coton passed to his niece, Elizabeth Hester Georgina Marie Orde, the daughter of the Rev. Thomas Bearcroft of Fitz, Shrewsbury, and his wife, Mary Hester Lillie Rosalie Honyman.
Elizabeth Bearcroft had married Captain Robert Charles Dighton Wilson in 1891 and, on inheriting Scottish property, the couple adopted the surname of Wilson-MacQueen in 1912, living at Redbrook Lodge near Whitchurch. After inheriting Coton Hall, they sold it to the Liverpool match manufacturer Sir Alexander Maguire, who was living at Coton by 1920. His tenure was not a lengthy one and he sold it on to Viscount Hill in 1924. On the main staircase, the Hills installed a memorial window, dedicated to General Rowland Hill, 1st Viscount Hill, that had formerly been in the chapel at Hawkstone (q.v.).
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- The Country Houses of Shropshire , pp. 191 - 192Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021