The earliest known building on the site was an Anglo-Saxon hunting lodge owned by Earl Edwin of Mercia. After the Norman Conquest of 1066 the estate was granted to Hugh Lupus, the first Norman Earl of Chester, and it stayed with the Norman earls until 1221, when it passed to the Crown. Henry III granted the manor to Hugh de Corona, and Hugh's son Thomas, who had no children of his own, gave it to his sister Ellen. Ellen married John de Legh of Booth in the early fourteenth century, during the reign of Edward II, and the property became the seat of the Leghs of Adlington. The hall they inherited was a quadrangle of timber-framed buildings surrounded by a moat. The Great Hall on the north side was built for Thomas Legh I between 1480 and 1505, and the east wing and porch were added for Thomas Legh III in 1581, the porch still bearing its long inscription with that date carved on the timberwork.

During the English Civil War, Adlington Hall was occupied by Parliamentarian forces. Country houses in Cheshire were often turned into temporary garrisons or quartered with troops by whichever side held the surrounding territory, and the Leghs found themselves living on a property held by men with no particular interest in preserving its medieval fabric. After the war, in the late seventeenth century, the family encased the Great Hall in brick, inserted larger windows for light, and installed the organ that would later be played by Handel. The renovation was characteristic of the Restoration era: medieval framing left intact where it could be, but updated with brick and glass and modern comforts on top, the older bones still visible behind the newer skin if you looked for them.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the house was inherited by Charles Legh, who set about transforming it. Between 1749 and 1757 he built a new west wing containing a ballroom, and a south wing with a large portico of four Ionic columns rising the full height of the building, carved with the inscription CHARLES & HESTER LEGH 1757 across its frieze and the Legh arms in the pediment. It is possible that Charles Legh himself was the architect, an amateur of considerable ambition. He also redesigned the grounds. He laid out gardens and woodland, planted the Lime Avenue south of the lawn, built a Shell House whose interior is decorated with shells and coloured mirrors, and put up follies in the Wilderness through which the River Dean runs. The most striking of these was the Chinese Bridge, an early Chinoiserie structure that carried a summerhouse across the river. The summerhouse is gone. The bridge survives.

By the early twentieth century Adlington Hall was simply too large for its family to maintain. In 1928 the building was reconstructed and reduced in size. Much of Charles Legh's west wing was demolished, a screen wall was built to fill the gap, and parts of the south wing were removed. The grounds, including the Shell House and the Wilderness, were already showing signs of neglect, and through the rest of the twentieth century the condition of some of the garden buildings deteriorated. The Rathouse and the Hermitage collapsed under fallen trees. Many of the winding paths Charles Legh had laid out in the Wilderness became overgrown. From the 1950s onward the family began a programme of restoration, recovering parts of the parkland and adding new formal gardens, including a rose garden and a yew maze to the north of the house.

Adlington Hall was designated a Grade I listed building on 25 July 1952, the highest level of protection in the English heritage system, reserved for buildings of exceptional interest and sometimes considered to be internationally important. The grounds are separately registered at Grade II* on the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens, and the estate contains eleven Grade II listed buildings beyond the hall itself. The south wing of the stable block, converted into eight flats called The Mews, is Grade II* listed. In 1984 the hall served as Stoke Moran, the home of Dr Grimesby Roylott, for The Speckled Band episode of Granada Television's Sherlock Holmes, and was used again in 1986 for the Abbey Grange episode. In 2023 the hall was sold with 1,921 acres of land for a guide price of 30 million pounds, ending the Leghs' tenure of the property. The Great Hall and the Hunting Lodge are still available for hire for weddings and social functions, and the rest of the house is open to the public for guided tours.