THE MANSION HOUSE OF DRINKSTONE PARK STOOD MIDWAY BETWEEN BURY ST EDMUNDS AND STOWMARKET south of what is now the A14 trunk road and on the edge of the village from which it took its name. There is no evidence that it was built on the site of any earlier house, but it is likely that its parkland predates the building of the house and was possibly the area of a medieval deer park. The house and its park stood in an estate comprising Links Farm and other land in the parishes of Drinkstone and Hessett, which the second Joshua Grigby assembled in the middle of the eighteenth century. After additions in the years following his death in 1771 the estate extended to some 250 acres, and the park around the house was laid out with plantations and a sheet of water.

Joshua Grigby II, whose father, son and grandson all bore the same name, came from a family of some means but he greatly augmented his inheritance in the course of his career as a lawyer. He acted as steward of various manors held by landed gentry in Suffolk and as Town Clerk of Bury St Edmunds and prospered from his property and commercial dealings. The writer of a letter contemporaneous with his death in 1771 speculates that his estate might have amounted to £100,000 (equivalent to some £6 million), but this appears to have been an over-estimate and a later appraisal of Grigby's wealth suggests a figure of £58,000.

On Joshua Grigby II's death the estate passed to his son Joshua Grigby III, a barrister and Member of Parliament and then in 1798 to his grandson, another Joshua. Joshua Grigby IV was a local magistrate, a deputy lieutenant of Suffolk and in 1810 High Sheriff of the county. After his death in 1829 without children the house was lived in by his second wife, Anna, until her death in 1853, but the estate had been left to John Harcourt Powell, the son of Grigby's niece, Lucy. For much of the second half of the nineteenth century Thomas Harcourt Powell lived at Drinkstone, where he created a very fine garden with specialised hot houses, greenhouses and a fernery and planted many specimen trees in the park. Thomas Harcourt Powell died in 1892, and the house ceased to be occupied by members of the family who built it.