Welcome to this ancient manor, immortalised by Shakespeare in his play "As You Like It" -- the home of a hero of that play: “Old Sir Rowland”. Sir Rowland Hill built this house in a Renaissance code in the reign of Queen Mary I. From here he ushered in the glorious culture of Elizabethan England. Can you solve the puzzles built into the bricks and stones?

A brief history of Soulton is, essentially, impossible. What follows is an account of some of the ideas used to design the buildings here and some highlights of events centred around this place over the last 1000 years. The striking country house and house of state at Soulton is the vision of Sir Rowland Hill, the Tudor statesman, philanthropist, merchant and scholar. He is associated with Shakespeare’s “Old Sir Rowland” in the play As You Like It. His extraordinary life involved: · saving multiple cultural treasures, · the coordination the Geneva Bible of 1560, an extremely dangerous project amounting to treason while it was undertaken (please note the presence of an exceptionally rare priests hide for the reign of Mary I in the studiolo [‘studiolo’ is a name for a room, taken from from the Italian, meaning little studio is a small room dedicated to reading, studying and writing]), · sitting as a judge in trials for treason, · being “the great occupier” for trade of what is now Germany, and personally holding a substantial amount of the English/Crown national debt while also controlling access to foreign exchange, · surviving an attack by pirates, and · kindling the first embers of English Drama. His Renaissance house is part theatre, part temple, part university, part hospital, part national back-up generator and part sanctuary. It was a much bigger set of buildings than what survives today and would have read to us today as a palace complex, but the current hall survives as Hill and his associates intended. The building is constructed in a self-admitting code.

Shropshire was drawn on by William Shakespeare for his beloved comedy "As You Like It". Sir Rowland Hill, a prominent figure from the region, is widely believed to be the inspiration for the character of Sir Rowland in the play, adding a whole new dimension to appreciating the area's charm. Shropshire's rolling countryside, with its picturesque villages and lush greenery, is a spitting image of Shakespeare's idyllic Forest of Arden. Take a walk through the meadows and let your imagination transport you to the 16th century. "I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it".