Pale

The Pale was the area around Dublin under direct English control in the late Middle Ages, so called because, supposedly, it was enclosed by a boundary ditch. In fact the area of the Pale varied greatly, sometimes extending out in a great arc of territory, but sometimes being little more than then area immediately around Dublin. Life in the Pale, beyond the Pale, and in the turbulent borderlands, is described and explained in two chapters in the first book of Rutherfurd?s Irish saga: 'Dalkey' and 'The Pale'.