The 29.5-acre (11.9 ha) estate is located on a hillside, and commands views across the "Golden Valley" to the west and the Severn Estuary in the south.

The main building was constructed around 1830, and partly rebuilt around 1900–1910, on the site of an earlier house which was the birthplace of William Blethyn, Bishop of Llandaff.

Prior to the construction of Shirenewton Court, an earlier building was occupied since the Middle Ages by the Blethyn (or Bleddyn) family.

[3] Lowe wrote many books on the cultivation of woodland ferns and some species of these grow around the churchyard walls at Shirenewton Church.

[4] After Lowe's death in 1900, the estate was sold to Charles Oswald Liddell, a wealthy shipping merchant who traded with China and Japan and who became Sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1918.

An east wing, added in 1909, was designed by Chepstow architect Norman Evill, a pupil of Edwin Lutyens; it included a billiard room, loggia, and belvedere tower.

[3] In 1988, the BBC television film The Woman He Loved, about the abdication of King Edward VIII, starring Anthony Andrews and Olivia de Havilland and Jane Seymour, was partly shot at the estate.

[2] [11] The grounds include a Japanese garden, containing six ponds at different levels; a teahouse, now a Grade II* listed building; two bridges, one painted red and the other of stone; and winding pathways.