beyond the pale

This lunchtime Nogbad asked me if I had my blip for the day. My answer was simple ... No. As the afternoon progressed I began to despair; overtaken by the realisation that an 'emergency blip' was looming ever nearer.

There are a few places along my route in to work that I've earmarked as potentially good sites and it has been my intention to use these as fallback blips in just such a situation. And so this evening, with traffic slow out of Forest Row, I pulled into the car park of Broadstone Warren Scout Camp on the A22 - between Forest Row and Wych Cross - and walked back a few yards to take this picture.

You can't see it in this shot, but just the other side of the tree lined bank is a ditch and it is likely that the ditch and bank together once formed a pale. Ashdown Forest was first enclosed as a royal hunting park in the thirteenth century. The 'pale' fence enclosed an area of over 5000 hectares within which red and fallow deer were hunted. The pale was formed by digging a ditch and piling up the excavated earth in a mound on the far side of it. This mound was often topped with a fence. The idea was that deer outside the pale could jump into the forest but, once inside, could not jump back out because of the ditch. Deer are no longer the property of the Crown but are wild animals, without ownership. If they are on your land, they are your responsibility.

The word pale derives ultimately from the Latin word palus, meaning stake, specifically a stake used to support a fence. From this came the figurative meaning of boundary and eventually the phrase beyond the pale, as something outside the boundary. Also derived from the "boundary" concept was the idea of a pale as an area within which local laws were valid.

Unfortunately the light at 05:30pm wasn't exactly perfect and I may have to come back to the pale another time to get a better shot. The pale is right by the road which you can clearly see on the right of the shot.