The architectural writer John Newman describes it as "the most complete small medieval manor house in the county".

[2] The earliest recorded owner is Sir Thomas Cawne, who fought in France with Edward the Black Prince and who acquired the Mote in the 1360s.

[6] During her reclusive tenure, Joseph Nash drew the house for his multi-volume illustrated history Mansions of England in the Olden Time, published in the 1840s.

[7] A brownwash watercolour painting dated c.1828 by Samuel Palmer shows that part of the building had been converted to an oast house.

Ightham Mote was rented in 1887 to the American railway magnate William Jackson Palmer and his family and for three years became a centre for artists and writers of the Aesthetic Movement, with visitors including John Singer Sargent, Henry James and Ellen Terry.

When Mrs Bigge died in 1889, the executors of her son Charles Selby-Bigge, a Shropshire land agent, put the house up for sale in July 1889.

[9] Sir Thomas Colyer-Fergusson's third son, Riversdale, died aged 21 in 1917 at the Third Battle of Ypres, and was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

The oldest brother, Max, was killed at the age of 49 in a bombing raid on an army driving school near Tidworth in 1940 during World War II.

[10] In 1989, the National Trust began an ambitious conservation project that involved dismantling much of the building and recording its construction methods before rebuilding it.

[11] The construction is of "Kentish ragstone and dull red brick,"[12] the buildings of the courtyard having originally been built of timber and subsequently rebuilt in stone.

The earliest surviving evidence is for a house of the early 14th century, with the great hall, to which were attached, at the high, or dais end, the chapel, crypt and two solars.

The structures include unusual and distinctive elements, such as the porter's squint, a narrow slit in the wall designed to enable a gatekeeper to examine a visitor's credentials before opening the gate.