History

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Then and now, Attingham's Walled Garden...

Did you know?

  • Attingham comes from the Saxon: ‘dwelling of the people of St Eata’.
  • The family motto is apt: ‘Let wealth be his who knows its use’.
  • Berwick Maviston was the medieval village removed to improve the park.
  • Thomas, 2nd Lord Berwick, once had a working model of Mount Vesuvius.
  • The 8th Lord Berwick was president of the RSPCA for 25 years.
  • During WWII an airfield was built to the east of the park.
  • The Orangery was once used as a cinema.
  • In the 1950s Percy Thrower did some garden shows for the BBC here.
  • The original house was called Tern Hall, named after the River Tern.
  • 1st Lord Berwick moved the London-Holyhead road away from the house.
  • The ice house by the river was converted to pump water to the house.

Our estate - 4000 years of history

Part of Attingham's estate: a view over the River Tern towards the Deer Park. © NT/Ben Harwood

© NT/Ben Harwood

The estate is centred around the confluence of the Rivers Tern and Severn, with mostly flat light alluvial soils and lots of sand and gravel. Our ancestors found this combination to their liking and we have lots of evidence of lots of human activity from an early age. The remains of Iron Age field systems, Bronze Age barrows, the Roman city of Viroconium, Saxon Palaces, medieval ridge and furrow and a Second World War RAF and USAAF airfield are testament to this. 

The Hill family, later to become the Lords Berwick, bought the original piece of land here in 1700, it came indirectly from land taken from Haughmond Abbey at the dissolution. Over the next century they added to their holding until at its height there were over 8,000 acres owned here, spreading right up into Shrewsbury.  The work of the last Lord and Lady Berwick to restore the mansion meant that half of this was sold off in the first half of the twentieth century, leaving nearly 4,000 acres that we still manage today.

An emotional day in our history