Downton Hall and its surrounding estate is a splendid Georgian creation, the house itself built in several very definite phases during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has produced a house which has some of the most handsome interiors, demonstrative of each era, in the county and, through its historic owners’ acquisitions of the surrounding properties, commands a dominant setting at the heart of its own demesne.

In the late seventeenth century, the lands immediately around the present house were in the different hands of the Hall, Sheppard and Pearce families. In addition, the Wredenhalls owned the site of the present house, albeit within a relatively restricted site which ran close to its neighbours. In the early eighteenth century, Serjeant William Hall (d. 1726) had made a fortune from the law which – in spite of two marriages without issue – was bequeathed initially to his nephew William Sheppard, the son of Serjeant Hall’s sister, Mary Hall and her husband Richard Sheppard of Middleton. The Sheppard family’s main seat had been at Crowleasowes, a brick house to the east of Downton that is said to have been built in 1623 by Dutch masons and which, in turn, is said to have replaced a timber-framed house called The Brookhouse.

William Sheppard took the Hall name upon his inheritance but died unmarried in 1731. He had, though, made provision for his sister, Elizabeth Sheppard, with his fortune passing in trust to her. Elizabeth had in 1722 married Wredenhall Pearce, whose mother, Anne Wredenhall, had been the heiress of Downton and this passed to her son, who bore the distinctive family name as his forename, in 1731. With the Sheppard-Pearce marriage, much of the land in the immediate vicinity of the site now occupied by Downton Hall had been united and the east range of the house was commissioned by Wredenhall and Elizabeth Pearce, apparently from William Smith junior, in circa 1731–4. A surviving elevation of the east front shows the two-and-a-half storey front of five bays recessed between the projecting two bay outer blocks, and with the hipped roof concealed by the cornice. The central ground floor door is shown with pedimented rusticated Gibbs surround, with keystones above each window and alternative angle treatments. In the event, although the Gibbsian doorcase has disappeared, the house was bound by quoins and a single string-course was used between the floors.