This was long the seat of the Atcherley family, during whose tenure the house evolved to be an asymmetrical mansion of three storeys. Mate illustrated the house in 1906 hiding coyly behind a giant cedar tree, its elevations either rendered or limewashed. Its north-facing entrance front had a single-storey colonnade, of four pairs of Tuscan columns supporting an entablature that was flanked by projecting wings. Within this building was apparently a core of the later seventeenth century, the product of a rebuilding by Thomas Atcherley (1609/10–1681) who had married Eleanor, the daughter of Robert Griffiths, Alderman of Shrewsbury in 1642. Thomas’s great-grandfather, Sir Roger Atcherley Kt, had been Lord Mayor of London in 1511. He died in 1521 leaving a son, Richard, who appears to have been the first of the family to be described as ‘of Marton’.

In the nineteenth century, the Atcherleys were the owners of Cymmau in Flintshire and Whatcroft Hall in Cheshire, in addition to Marton. David Jones (1783–1845), Serjeant-at-Law and Attorney General of the Counties of Lancaster and Durham, was the inheritor of the three properties. His father, David Francis Jones was the owner of Cymmau, whilst through his mother, Jane Atcherley, he became the eventual heir of Marton on the death of her brother, Richard in 1834. Through his wife, Ann Margaret, daughter of James Topping of Whatcroft, whom he married in 1817, Jones inherited that Cheshire property and, in 1834, by Royal Licence assumed the name and arms of Atcherley only when he inherited Marton. He and his wife were keen opera lovers and held their own amateur performance of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore at the house, in aid of local charities, in 1878.

In 1888, on David Atcherley’s death, Marton and Cymau, together with the Fridd Estate in Flintshire, passed to his nephew, Francis Robinson Hartland Atcherley (1865–1895), the eldest son of Colonel Francis Topping Atcherley (d. 1874) of the 30th Foot – later 1st Battalion East Lancashire Regiment – and his wife, the former Miss Heward. Frank Atcherley (as he was known) only lived at Marton for two years after inheriting the estate. On his marriage to Esther Hodgson Mills, daughter of John Mills of Northwold, Bowden, two years later, he moved to live at the Stone House, West Felton. Dying, tragically young, at the age of just thirty in 1895, he left a five-year-old daughter, Muriel (b. 1890).