Coton Hall, our ancestral home

The family, originally named de la Lee and probably of Norman descent, lived in Coton Hall from the 1300s onwards. Present day Coton Hall was built soon after 1800 for Harry Lancelot Lee, in the Georgian style. At the time the estate ran to 5,000 acres.

Although the present building is only some 200 years old, the Lee family's connections with the land go back 1,000 years. The previous building on the site was also called Coton Hall - and it was from here that Robert E. Lee's ancestors left for America in the 1600s. They originally went there to trade, and one or two returned to England after a few years, but one branch forged new lives for themselves in the young country, acquiring land and power. Two of them, Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee, were the only brothers to sign the Declaration of Independence. General Robert E. Lee's father was 'Light Horse Harry' Lee, a famous soldier of the Revolutionary War, where he was known for his courage in fighting the British.

And by a bizarre paradox, he may well have been reponsible for the deaths of soldiers from Shropshire - elements of the 53rd Regiment, which later became the Shropshire Regiment, were all but wiped out and the remainder captured at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. Light Horse Harry resigned from the army as soon as the British were defeated, and settled down to raise the family that included the young general.

But little remains of the house that Robert E. Lee's ancestors would have known. In the grounds of Coton Hall is one of the last remnants of the early buildings - the ruins of a chapel that probably dates from the 13th Century. But it's underground where the strongest traces of the old Coton Hall remain. The house's cellar is two storeys deep and in the lower of the two levels includes the entrance to a tunnel.

The tunnel runs all the way to Alveley village two miles away, although it's been concreted off beyond the chapel for safety reasons. Coton Hall passed out of the Lee family when Harry Lancelot Lee died in 1821 and the house was immediately sold, ending the Lees' long association with this part of the world. In 1878 the chapel roof collapsed and all the Lee monuments were moved to Alveley church. The house itself was extended in about 1860, when a new wing and an Italianate tower were added, but apart from that the house has survived remarkably well - all the fireplaces and cornices are original, for example.