Croft Castle

A building has stood on this ground since about 1085, when the Croft family established the estate; the first of them recorded as its owner, Bernard de Croft, appears in Domesday Book. The family were closely tied to their neighbours the Mortimers of Wigmore and Ludlow. In 1461 the Battle of Mortimer's Cross was fought on Croft land nearby.

The family also married across the Welsh border: Sir John de Croft took as his wife Janet, one of Owain Glyndŵr's daughters. In the fifteenth century the Crofts adopted the Welsh Wyvern crest, a wounded black dragon, read since as an allusion to that Glyndŵr descent.

Sir Richard Croft (1429/30–1509) served as a royal official under Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III and Henry VII in turn. His contemporary Thomas Croft (c.1435–1488) was a shipowner and a patron of Atlantic exploration. A generation on, Sir James Croft (c.1518–1590) was Lord Deputy of Ireland and a leading conspirator in Wyatt's Rebellion, and later held the office of Comptroller of the Household to Elizabeth I.

The pattern of service ran late. Henry Page Croft, 1st Baron Croft (1881–1947), was Under-Secretary of State for War from 1940 to 1945, and Sir James Herbert Croft died on active service with No 1 Commando in 1941.

The present house was raised in the 1660s, while Herbert Croft (1603–1691) — chaplain to Charles I and dean of the Chapels Royal to Charles II — was Bishop of Hereford. It replaced an earlier house standing some thirty yards to the west, whose remains were excavated in 2002 by the Herefordshire county archaeologist Keith Ray and a team of volunteers. Built quadrangular around a central courtyard with round towers at the corners, it counts as one of the first examples of the medieval revival, with affinities to Ruperra Castle in Caerphilly and Lulworth Castle in Dorset.

The Crofts suffered financially after the South Sea Bubble, and in 1746 sold the estate to Richard Knight (1693–1765), eldest son and heir of the Richard Knight who ran the Bringewood Ironworks and built a fortune and a dynasty out of them. Knight's only daughter, Elizabeth, married Thomas Johnes of Llanfair Clydogau, MP for Radnorshire from 1777 to 1780.

It was Johnes who in the 1760s remodelled Croft in the Rococo-Gothic style, to designs by the Shrewsbury architect Thomas Farnolls Pritchard, who also designed the world's first iron bridge over the Severn near Coalbrookdale. Georgian sash windows replaced the mullions, and Pritchard supplied the plasterwork ceilings, the Gothic staircase and, through master craftsmen, the chimneypieces. Croft was put up for sale in 1799 and bought by Somerset Davies (c.1754–1817), MP for Ludlow.

In 1913 the architect Walter Sarel cut out the central section of the eighteenth-century Gothic entrance front, replacing it with a battlemented porch and a mullioned bay window above, lined the entrance hall with oak panelling, redesigned the dining room and stripped away most of Pritchard's crenellations. Ten years later, in 1923, the Kevill-Davies — descendants of Somerset Davies — sold Croft back to Katherine, Lady Croft. In 1937 the seventeenth-century service wing to the north-west was pulled down to make the house more compact.

By 1957 Croft was threatened with demolition. Eighteen other great houses in the county had already gone, and the destruction of country houses was gathering pace nationally, continuing through the 1960s. Diana Uhlman, née Croft, was determined Croft would not follow them. Members of the family raised an endowment, without which the National Trust would not take on the house and remaining estate, and in 1957 Croft passed to the Trust. It opened to the public in 1960, after Michael, Lord Croft, had acquired paintings and furniture for the showrooms and his sister Diana had founded and funded the Croft Trust. Members of the family occupy the house still.