The Old Hall in the village had been a substantial building - first mentioned in 1327, owned by the Wrightson family since Robert Wrightson bought it from Sir Christopher Wray in 1669. Joseph Dickinson's 1719 plan shows a house and gardens of only one acre, with an orchard of two more, and a Parke of about twenty-five. Between 1726 and 1735 the family expanded the gardens, laying out the Bowling Green and the two-storey Summerhouse - features that still survive in the walled garden today. Then in 1740 they began the new hall. As Platt's masons worked through 1745, the old building was demolished piece by piece, and many of its dressed stones were carried up the scarp and built into the rising walls of the new house. James Paine, the period's most fashionable Yorkshire architect, finished the job between 1749 and 1753, adding a chapel and a library.

When the estate passed in 1760 to Isabella Wrightson and her husband John Battie, who took the additional name Wrightson in 1766, they hired Richard Woods. Woods belonged to the same generation of landscape designers as Lancelot Capability Brown - one of the architects of the English Landscape Park, the rolling, naturalistic style that became Britain's visual export. Cusworth was one of Woods's most important South Yorkshire commissions, alongside Cannon Hall. He laid out 250 acres of park, a hanging garden, and a serpentine river of three lakes joined by a Cascade and a Rock Arch. The lakes, the bridges, and the planted clumps were designed to be discovered, not displayed - the eighteenth-century idea that a great house should appear to sit naturally in landscape that art had carefully arranged.

The Wrightsons did what English landed families did - they sent sons to Parliament and accumulated long compound surnames. William Wrightson (1752-1827) was MP for Aylesbury and High Sheriff of Yorkshire. His son William Battie-Wrightson sat for East Retford, Kingston upon Hull, and Northallerton in turn, and died in 1879 without children. The hall passed to a brother, then a nephew who married Lady Isabella Cecil, eldest daughter of the 3rd Marquess of Exeter. Between 1903 and 1909 Lady Isabella altered the house again, leaving her name on the decorative garden west of the chapel. The estate grew to twenty thousand acres at its peak. Then it shrank. In 1961 Doncaster Rural District Council bought what was left - hall and adjoining parkland - from the family.

The reception rooms and galleries opened in 1967 as the Museum of South Yorkshire Life. Between 2002 and 2005 a 7.5 million pound restoration repaired the stonework, the roof, and the designed landscape - guided in part by Richard Woods's own written memoranda and sketches, preserved in the family papers and dug out for the project. The house reopened in May 2007. The Trompe-l'oeil paintings added to the upper chamber of the Summerhouse during 1990s restoration show imagined walled gardens at Cusworth - a kind of dream-portrait of the place painted onto its own walls. On Saturday mornings at nine, a free parkrun threads through Woods's landscape; the first event was on 5 October 2019. The serpentine river, the Cascade, the bowling green - and the long view south over Doncaster - are still there.