The very name of the house suggests antiquity and evokes the setting of the property encircled by water. The house today is an L-plan building with a ground floor overbuilt in brick and a rendered, gabled upper storey of low architectural pretensions. Yet Moat Hall was the ancient seat of the recusant family of Berington, whose town house located in St Alkmund’s Place in Shrewsbury was probably the site of the first post-reformation place of Catholic worship in the town.

The family is said to have originated from Berrington to the south of the county town, with Thomas de Berington’s elder son Roger being the early fourteenth-century ancestor of the Shrewsbury line of the family and his third son, Thomas, being the forebear of the Herefordshire branch of the family. Roger Berington’s grandson, Thomas – Bailiff of Shrewsbury in 1366 and 1372 – who had married Juliana Blakley, seems to have been the first recorded member of the family to own land at Moat Hall in 1367.

Roger Berington (d. 1596), who was fifth in descent from Thomas and Juliana, is thought to have rebuilt Moat Hall in circa 1580–1600 as a significant timber-framed house with elaborate interiors. His first wife was Margaret, daughter and heiress of John Lynde of Salop, and the couple’s arms were to be found on the overmantel of the dining room at Moat Hall. The structure still shows that the building was originally of jettied construction on at least the east elevation, with evidence of an oriel window recorded on the first floor of the west side.

Inside, a bedroom over the former hall still retains a superb plaster-decorated ceiling, geometrically compartmentalised by slender ribs and ornamented with a central Tudor rose that is surrounded by oak tree, bay tree, fleur-de-lis and vine trail motifs which have been suggested as having Catholic allegorical symbolism. Originally this was complemented by full height wall panelling, divided by fluted pilasters and with a frieze that bore central foliate bosses that were embraced by foliate carving. The room’s chimneypiece, illustrated by H.E. Forrest, had a tripartite arcaded overmantel, bearing the Berington escutcheon of arms, and was supported by full height, carved, bearded term figures holding halberds.