Atkinson & Marshall Project

Atkinson & Marshall were two successful Northumbrian farming families. Northumberland Archives holds a box of correspondence and papers relating to the Atkinson & Marshall. The box contains hundreds of pieces of paper, many of which relate to Atkinson & Marshall’s interests in sheep farming on the Sutherland Estate in Scotland. From 1805, Atkinson & Marshall began to lease land on Estate eventually leasing more than 100,000 acres. The introduction of large-scale sheep farming resulted in the mass eviction of tenants, a movement that became known as The Highland Clearances. At the heart of this policy were William Young and Patrick Sellar, agents to the Countess of Sutherland. The Atkinson & Marshall papers contain correspondence with both agents and other interesting material relating to the clearances.

Prof. Annie Tindley, Professor of British and Irish Rural History and Head of the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at Newcastle University, obtained a grant from The Strathmartine Trust to allow her to undertake research on these little-known papers. The grant has allowed Northumberland Archives to undertake detailed cataloguing of the Atkinson & Marshall papers. Textual descriptions of the collection will be available in our online catalogue later in 2024.