All in a life's work

Shropshire lads supreme and joined-up thinking in Oxfordshire

- Penny Churchill

AFTER a distinguished career spanning almost 50 years, softly spoken Tony Morris-Eyton of Savills in Telford has stepped back from his longstanding role as head of the firm's West Midlands operations to concentrate on his first love, the sale of prime country houses and estates in his native Shropshire, where he served as High Sheriff of the county in 2021-22. As the scion of one of Shropshire's oldest families, he knows every nook and cranny of the county's finest properties, many of which he has sold more than once over the years.

A recent success was the sale, last autumn, of Grade II-listed Woodhill Park, a glorious Georgian house set within a ring-fenced, 156-acre estate in unspoilt Shropshire countryside, four miles from Oswestry and 22 miles from Shrewsbury. Previously part of the Ormsby-Gore family's Brogyntyn estate, Woodhill Park was sold by Mr Morris-Eyton to last year's vendors in 1987 and again on their behalf last year, when the estate was quickly snapped up, at a guide price of $4.5 million, by a London buyer returning to his Shropshire roots. In 1985, Francis Ormsby-Gore, 6th Baron Harlech inherited the Brogyntyn estate following his father's death in a car accident and was immediately hit by crippling death duties, which eventually forced the sale of the estate and his ancestral home, Brogyntyn Hall, in 2000. In the meantime, Lord Harlech had been living at The Mount, a crumbling Edwardian house on the edge of the estate, which was acquired by a dynamic local businessman and eventually demolished.