The house was probably built by Robert and Isabella de Herle, tenants of nearby Charley Priory in the late thirteenth century. From the 1530s until 1627 the site belonged to the Digby family, whose main seat lay at Tilton on the Hill but whose holdings spread across Leicestershire and beyond. Around 1618, in what amounts to one of the more dramatic mid-life renovations in English domestic architecture, the manor was substantially modernised: storerooms downstairs were converted into a kitchen and parlour, a new roof went on, the upstairs was remodelled with a fresh internal staircase, and large rectangular mullioned windows were punched through the medieval walls. The Jacobean flourish is what visitors mostly see today - hence the building's current branding as 'The 1620s House and Garden.' But the bones beneath the upgrade are still very firmly medieval.

The Digbys are the reason this house carries more historical weight than its size would suggest. John Digby of Seaton, who owned Donington in the early 1600s, was a known recusant Catholic - that is, someone who refused to attend Church of England services in an era when that refusal could be punished with fines, excommunication, and worse. John himself spent time in the Tower of London under suspicion of involvement in the Babington Plot against Elizabeth I. His nephew, Sir Everard Digby, had moved to Buckinghamshire after marrying a wealthy heiress and become close friends with Robert Catesby - the man at the centre of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Everard's job in the conspiracy was to raise a Midlands rebellion after Parliament was destroyed and to kidnap Princess Elizabeth, James I's nine-year-old daughter, from Coombe Abbey. The plot failed; Sir Everard was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1606 at the age of 27. The Donington family lived on under suspicion, paying fines, attending mass quietly, holding their faith through years when holding it was dangerous.

The 2016 refurbishment furnished the house as a Catholic Digby family home of the 1620s might have looked, with a generous mixture of original and replica pieces that visitors are invited to touch and use. Almost everything is for handling. The one exception sits in an upstairs chamber: an ornately carved four-poster known locally as King Dick's Bed, traditionally said to have come from the Blue Boar Inn in Leicester, where Richard III is supposed to have slept on the night before he rode out to die at Bosworth Field. The story is too tidy to be quite true - the bed's style places it considerably later than 1485, and it fits more comfortably into a Jacobean household than a Plantagenet one. Still, the legend has clung to the object for centuries, and the curators have wisely declined to debunk it too aggressively. The house also retains its connection to the Battle of Bosworth through Sir John Digby, the family's late-medieval ancestor, who fought there in 1485 for Henry Tudor and was rewarded with the restoration of family lands lost a generation earlier.

From 1670 to 1960, the manor was rented out as a working farm, with proceeds going to support a hospital and orphanage in nearby Osgathorpe. Two hundred and ninety years of agricultural labour is the largest single chapter of the building's life, and it explains the modesty of the current structure: a manor house used by farmers, modified and patched as practical needs required, eventually subdivided for pigs. By the time Leicestershire County Council bought the property in 1965, it was close to dereliction. The restoration that followed was unfussy and serious, and the house opened as a museum in 1973. The Friends of Donington le Heath, a registered charity, fund much of the work in the gardens today. The walled garden, planted with 17th-century species, is the kind of place where you forget what century you are in - which is, of course, the point.