The Ripley estate came into Ingleby hands by marriage in 1308 or 1309, when Sir Thomas Ingleby wed the heiress Edeline Thwenge. The first great family story belongs to his son, also called Thomas, born 1310. While hunting with the king, Thomas saved the monarch from being gored by a wild boar. He was knighted in return, and granted a boar's head as his heraldic crest - a symbol the family still bears. His descendant Sir John Ingleby (1434-1499) inherited the estate at age five and built the castle gatehouse before, in a remarkable second career, becoming a monk at Mount Grace Priory near Northallerton and ultimately Bishop of Llandaff. His grandson Sir William Ingleby (1518-1578) added the tower in 1548. Two of that William's sons paid the price of Catholic conviction: Francis, a priest, was hanged, drawn and quartered at York in 1586; David escaped to die on the Continent. The price of recusancy in Tudor England was steep, and Ripley paid it in full.

Sir William Ingleby (1546-1618) had a quieter run with kings. James VI of Scotland knighted him in 1603 while travelling south to be crowned James I of England. Later that same year, Ingleby helped capture one of the fugitive brothers of the Earl of Gowrie at Kirkby Malzeard - a victory that should have secured the family's position. Then came 1605. Ingleby's nephew was Robert Winter, one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. The plotters stayed at Ripley while they procured horses for what would have been the mass assassination of king, lords, and commons at the State Opening of Parliament. Ingleby was arrested and charged with treason. He was acquitted - sufficient doubt existed about his knowledge of the plot - but the family came perilously close to losing everything in one of the most dangerous moments of post-Reformation England.

The Ingleby baronetcy was created in 1642, became extinct in 1772, then was revived in 1781 for an illegitimate son. His son William Amcotts-Ingilby (1783-1854) was, in the family's own telling, "a great eccentric, drinker and gambler." He served as MP for East Retford from 1807 to 1812 and High Sheriff in 1821. He adopted his mother's surname of Amcotts and styled himself Amcotts-Ingilby. Most extraordinarily, he demolished the entire village of Ripley and rebuilt it in a Continental style, complete with what he called a hôtel de ville - a town hall on a French model that still anchors the village square today. Having no heir, he left the estate to his first cousin Henry John Ingilby. The Continental village survives as one of the more unusual planned settlements in England, and Ripley village's stone facades feel like a Yorkshire fragment that broke off from somewhere along the Loire.

Television cameras have visited Ripley often. Yorkshire Television's children's series The Flaxton Boys (1969-1973) used the castle as fictional Flaxton Hall. The 1976 Disney film Escape from the Dark made it the home of Lord Harrogate, played by Alastair Sim. The 2017 BBC series Gunpowder filmed here - appropriate, given the family's actual Gunpowder Plot connection. Channel 5's 2021 miniseries Anne Boleyn used the castle as a location. The architecture itself is a Grade I listed catalogue of English country house ambition: a 16th-century tower, an L-shaped main block largely rebuilt 1783-1786, a Grade II* orangery from around 1785, stables of 1786 forming two ranges at right angles, a prostyle temple folly in the grounds. In June 2024, Sir Thomas Ingilby announced the sale. The original guide price was £21 million; by late 2025 the asking price for the castle lot had been reduced by £7.5 million to £13.5 million for the whole estate. The Ingilbys had held Ripley for over seven centuries. One day soon, someone else will.