Upon the sudden death of the second Viscount in 1802, the Cliffoney estates were inherited by his oldest son, Henry John Temple, better known as the third Viscount, Lord Palmerston. The young Lord Palmerston visited his Sligo estates, consisting of some 10,000 acres, for the first time in 1808."He found a destitute tenantry renting small plots from middlemen, who set the land to tenants in rundale, a system of communal occupation under which an individual tenant might from time to time hold many tiny detached plots. In the early nineteenth century huge tracts of Ahamlish were destroyed by shifting sands, but Palmerston sought to bring the bogs there, as well as the sands ruined by sand, into cultivation."Palmerston began a building programme, renovating the old Market House which became a hotel, the Cliffoney Inn in 1820. A boys school was built next door in 1824 and a girls school at the north end of the village in 1826, replacing the old hedge school in Ahamlish. Palmerston immediately clashed with the Catholic priest Fr. John McHugh, the priest forbidding children attend either school unless a Catholic teacher was employed.