Tong Castle

The original castle at Tong was built in the twelfth century, on the ground between Wolverhampton and Telford where the later house would stand. During the Civil War it was defended for the King by William Careless, and afterwards by George Mainwaring.

In 1756 Maria Fitzherbert, born Mary Ann Smythe, was born at Tong Castle, reputedly in the Red Room, while the estate was still owned by the Duke of Kingston; she may have been his illegitimate daughter. Twice widowed, she went on to marry George IV while he was Prince of Wales. She died at Brighton in 1837 without ever being formally recognised as his wife, her Catholic lineage and the want of King George III's official sanction both standing against the marriage.

George Durant bought the estate at Tong from the Duke of Kingston in 1764, and in 1765 commissioned Lancelot "Capability" Brown to draw plans for rebuilding the castle and improving the landscape around it. Brown's account book records a charge to Durant that year for "Various Plans for the alterations of Tong Castle. My Journeys there several times", covering house and grounds alike and making Tong his first commission in Shropshire. The water features north and south of the castle were reworked into Church or North Pool and the serpentine South Pool, two larger lakes were added, and the kitchen garden was moved further from the house; the ice house is also thought to have been Brown's.

The original structure was demolished in 1765. The Tudor castle was remodelled in the Gothic style, keeping only the main block of the sixteenth-century red-brick castle, and some of the stone from the college that had stood near Tong church was reused in the new building. Crenellated towers and pediments, paned windows crowned by ogee curves and generous bay windows with circular windows and cruciform motifs place it in the Strawberry Hill Gothic popularised by Horace Walpole, which makes a house of 1765 a comparatively early example of a style then fairly rare. It has been called an "architectural mongrel", and also "the first real gothic building in Shropshire".

The house passed out of the Durant family in 1854 to the Earl of Bradford, who had no wish to live at Tong; he expanded his estate in the area and let the house, chiefly to the Hartley family of Wolverhampton, who leased it between 1856 and 1909. Fire damaged the house in 1911, and it was left unrestored and increasingly unstable until it was demolished in 1954. Flagstones from Tong Castle paved the outdoor war memorial built at nearby Albrighton in 1920. The site now lies on the route of the M54 motorway; it was first listed Grade II on 29 August 1984 for its special architectural or historic interest.