The ruins of the Augustinian Abbey of Lilleshall still stand to testify to the monastic origins of the former seat of the Dukes of Sutherland. The estate came to the Sutherland ancestors, after the Dissolution, when it was bought from the Crown in 1538 by James Leveson (d. 1547). He was a Merchant of the Staple from Wolverhampton who also acquired another former monastic property at Trentham in Staffordshire. His son, Richard (knighted 1553) further added to the family’s estates through a prudent marriage to Mary Gratewood – niece of Sir Rowland Hill (1498–1561), the great acquirer of dissolved monastic properties – and her dowry included further land that had formerly formed part of Lilleshall, Wenlock and Wombridge Priories.

The Leveson family initially took up residence in a part of the Abbey buildings and, on the southern side of the Lillyhurst Road, which runs between the villages of Lilleshall and Sheriffhales, maintained the medieval deer park. In the park, the family developed Lilleshall Lodge on Muxton Hill, a house which by the nineteenth century was an asymmetrical structure with two large gabled ranges, flanked by a smaller jettied timber-framed gabled range and what appeared to be a narrow range of stone with a giant chimney stack. It was perhaps of late sixteenth- or early to mid seventeenth-century date and survived until circa 1818 when its surroundings were compromised by the expansion of industry around Donnington Wood. The Lodge, though, was an occasional residence of the family until at least the late eighteenth century. Lilleshall was but one of a number of properties owned by the Levesons, albeit an important one for the mineral wealth that the estate yielded and which the family, throughout its ownership, was keen to exploit. Coal mining at Lilleshall was first noted in 1330 and it provided an income for the family from James Leveson until the twentieth-century sale of the estate.