Perched upon a rocky mount above the Severn Valley near Bridgnorth, Quatford is entirely the creation of John Smalman, the builder and architect, who built it as his home in 1829–1830. Smalman, the uncle of the Shrewsbury architect Samuel Pountney Smith, was also a poet and a man of social ambitions who claimed to be descended from the Smalmans of Wilderhope (q.v.). An Alderman and Mayor of Bridgnorth in 1837–8, it has been suggested that he may have been related to the ‘J. Smallman’ who signed a monument to Thomas and Mary Smyth (d. 1780) in the church at Much Wenlock. At the time of its construction, Quatford Castle was admired for its picturesque qualities, and Charles Hulbert believed that, archaeologically, the Castle was ‘The most perfect imitation I ever beheld’. Pugin and other architectural purists of the mid nineteenth-century, with their firm belief in honesty of design to function, may not have agreed.

Smalman’s Castle comprises a medley of interlinked polygonal towers of varying heights, all with massive crenellations and deep machicolations, the rooms within grouped to take full advantage of the views across the Severn Valley to the south-west. The wooded grounds of the castle are in part terraced, and together with a castellated watch tower and several of the houses in the village, no doubt also owe to Smalman for their authorship.

Smalman died unmarried in 1852, and Quatford eventually passed, in 1889, to his great-nephew. He was the Ven. Archdeacon H.E.J. Bevan (1854–1935), the son of Henry Bevan (d. 1869) of Shrewsbury, and Mary, daughter of Edward Smith and his wife, Hon. Charlotte (d. 1931), the daughter of 8th Viscount Molesworth. Archdeacon Bevan was succeeded at Quatford by his eldest son, the Ven. Hugh Henry Molesworth Bevan (1884–1970), Archdeacon of Ludlow. The Castle was sold by the family in the late twentieth century.